Gaspar Noé's "Love" — Art Either Arrives on Time or Not at All

The director did too thorough a job on me. The night after watching, I wasn't just dreaming images out of his film; another one started running by itself.

Armchair critics declared "Love" meaningless pornography available only to intellectuals, and it was duly kept out of release here. I'm not one of the lucky ones who saw it in a cinema, though five years ago the moment for it might not have existed anyway.

Works of art have to arrive on time. If you feel you haven't grown into one yet, don't torture yourself over it; there's no use. Sometimes you've simply landed in a world that isn't yours: trying to force your way into it usually fails, and can ruin the evening for whoever is watching beside you.

So be careful about what you sit down to, and come to it with your mind open and free — the connection has to happen at your end, nobody can make it for you. The viewer's job is worth a great deal here: you have to accept that this is meant for you. If it doesn't take, put it aside for a while; in a few years the film may open in fuller colour.

Plenty of work is only understood by later generations rather than by the author's contemporaries. It's painful to admit, but artists are sometimes born early — more often it's simply that we aren't ready to move toward a way of seeing that was closed to us before.

Our sense of reality is relative to begin with, and everyone has their own version. Letters carry their own shade, and colours are read completely differently by the brain: every scheme of light is felt psychologically, with an emotion attached. A colour that grates can be used as aggression; a warm one as calm. Full stops and commas in unexpected places can unsettle you and switch the imagination on — the way a strobe pulls you out of your head and back into your own experience.

Directors use all of this actively and build it into their films. Gaspar Noé made "Love" — a film that resembles a dream, or more precisely a high. Give yourself to it and you'll get the maximum available dose of both the pleasure and the pain.