Cannes, May 21: Not a chance.

There's not a chance that Love, which has the distinction of being the first pornographic movie shown during 68 years of the Cannes Film Festival, will ever get past censors in India.

Directed by Gaspar Noé, an Argentinian-born French film director and screenwriter, Love got a midnight screening last night, out of competition, at the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

The film, made with a budget of only $2.5-3 million, shows sex in 3-D, which is a first for Cannes.

Love depicts sexual relations in various permutations and combinations: boy-girl sex; girl-girl sex; a threesome with two girls and a boy; and sex between a boy and a transvestite.

The director said that when it came to filming the sex scenes, "there is the fake thing and there are real sex scenes. I am not saying which is fake and which is real."

The male character, Murphy, is played by an American actor, Karl Glusman, whom Noé has described as "the ultimate 3-D baby-maker".

The female leads are Aomi Muyock, a Swiss model, and Klara Kristin, both making their screen debuts. They play Electra and Omi, respectively, two attractive young women with whom Murphy has frequent and passionate sex.

Murphy is an English-speaking character living in Paris as a film student. It is here that he meets Electra, with whom he enters into a life-changing love affair. He also has sex with a neighbour, Omi, who becomes pregnant and has a child.

The director makes innovative use of 3-D. Bodily fluids fly towards viewers (it made a few journalists jump, while others tittered nervously). Intercourse is shown in real time in anatomical detail though it has to be said the cinematography is something Bollywood would love to emulate.

In 2013, a film depicting lesbian sex, Blue is the Warmest Colour, won the Palme d'Or, the top prize at Cannes.

That was regarded at the time as taking mainstream cinema where it had not gone before but Love has crossed the final frontier.

At today's post-screening press conference, The Telegraph put it to Noé that since it was certain the film would not be cleared by the censors in India, were there any arguments he could advance that might persuade them to change their minds?

Only half-jokingly, the director suggested that Indians who wanted to see the film "should fly to Paris".

"A lot of Japanese flew to Paris to see Emmanuelle," said Noé, referring to the 1974 soft pornographic French film, starring the late Sylvia Kristel.

There was one hall in Paris which was kept in business by foreign tourists, Noé recalled.

India was not the only conservative country, for the director did acknowledge: "I could not have done this film in America."

The director made the point that temple carvings in India, showing graphic sex, "were part of the beauty of the country".

In his programme notes, the director has said: "For years I have dreamed of making a film that would fully reproduce the passion of a young couple in love, in all its physical and emotional excesses."

He wanted to make "a contemporary melodrama incorporating multiple love scenes and transcending the ridiculous division that dictates no normal film can contain overtly erotic scenes, even though everyone loves to make love. I want to film that which cinema has rarely allowed."

At today's press conference, there was no pretence about calling Love anything other than a pornographic film in 3-D.

"Coming to Cannes is a lot of fun," admitted Noé. "But as soon as you say 'pornographic' people are scared. But I have made a film about life."