EDEN

(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)

Hansen-Løve gets moments and scenes so right that it can't help feel somewhat disappointing that she does not yet seem to know how to turn that talent into creating a satisfying feature.
That's not to say Eden is a failure; rather it is frustrating and a little thin, but there are beautiful stretches and lovely moments scattered throughout.
Based to some extent on the career of her older brother Sven as a DJ from the early '90s to the early 2010s, it follows Paul (Félix De Givry, delivering a performance which is either wooden or a great portrayal of a certain brand of bored, searching youth - it's hard to know which) through life in the dance scene in Paris after he and a schoolfriend set up as "Cheers" and begin playing garage classics at raves. By 2000 they host successful club nights, dj in New York, have a radio show, and their old friends Guy-Man and Harold are internationally famous as Daft Punk. But Paul is still a bit of a mess; broke, with a coke habit, unable to sustain a relationship, unsure of what to do next. With nice understatement, Hansen-Løve titles the second chapter of her two part story, "Lost in Music".
The very first scene perhaps establishes what Paul is searching for all those years: after leaving a party on a submarine, he hallucinates a beautiful animated bird in the dawn sky while sitting alone in the forest. After this we rarely get any view into his thoughts or feelings - we see him spin disks and pump his fist to crowds of dancers, and kiss girls and snort and drink and smoke - but what he thinks is rarely obvious.
Hansen-Løve does this sort of thing very well; this film is full of story but has little plot. It never feels contrived or fake (except perhaps for the difficult friend who you know will end up committing suicide from the very first time you see him, an entirely French cliche), and it does feel like life. That makes her brilliant at capturing how moments feel: what it is like to walk into a party with your friends at the age of 19, the surge of euphoria at a great tune on a dance floor, summer in a city, the morning after, the first flush of love. But over the course of two hours and ten minutes, the film feels a bit like an overlong dance remix - a little repetitive, a little shallow.
That could be changed if Paul were more interesting. We see him find and lose women (including an awkward Greta Gerwig), and in the coda, when he is attending a writers workshop, positively bathed in his own melancholy, he seems finally a character worth the attention the film has paid to him. The moment when sober, he watches a pretty girl DJ play a Daft Punk track from a Macbook at a new subterranean club and deals with his own complex feelings about it is as complex as anything in the film, which is always beautifully shot and obviously filled with terrific music.
None more terrific than that of Daft Punk, who ghost alongside Cheers throughout the story, as the only act to truly transcend Dance music as a genre. The moment when they show up at a party and nervously play their new song, "Da Funk", is probably the best in the film. And they benefit from a solid recurring gag, which is as light as Hansen-Løve gets.

GOODBYE FIRST LOVE

(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)

Camille (Lola Créton) is 15, and madly in love with her handsome, slightly older boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) in the way that only teenagers can really be. When he leaves for 10 months travelling in South America, and that becomes numberless years, she collapses emotionally. We next see her years later, studying architecture, and observe her begin a relationship with her middle-aged teacher (Magne Håvard Brekke) which lasts for a few seemingly content years. But then Sullivan re-enters her life and everything is thrown into question once more.
This is a simple old tale, this story of the first love which cuts deepest, and plainly autobiographical. It is perhaps strongest on the changes in the life of a young person. There are no political awakenings for Camille, just the realisation that architecture is her "vocation" and a new maturity about what she wants and what it means.
But the love story is problematic. Hansen-Løve shows us this couple kissing, arguing, hugging, weeping together. Their last holiday together is a familiarly idyllic rural break, and they are the kind of incredibly French characters who can leave no lake unswum, no horse unridden. Their passion is evident in the many bitter fights and recoveries they endure. We can see it, but crucially, we cannot feel it. There is an oddly cold distance here, between the heat of the emotions we witness and the measured recreation of those emotions by the filmmaker. It feels a little like being told by somebody about their great love affair. Interesting but not especially involving.
Camille's life away from Sullivan is always more compelling, and the film has an exciting sense of Paris as a living city, and a vivid way of expressing her growing feeling for architecture. The characters, particularly the pretentious, selfish, permanently scarfed Sullivan, flirt with being truly annoying, and are undeniably almost caricatures of the bourgeois cliches who have filled French cinema for decades; self-indulgent, solipsistic and whiny, only the warmth of the directors gaze and the charm of the actors redeem them.
The performances are always convincing, and Hansen-Løve is a good storyteller with a great sense of time and place and a feel for music, but you get the feeling that this film is just that bit too autobiographical for her. As Camille hears in class "Art is. Private matter for the Artist". Perhaps in this case, too private.