Eden

Mia Hansen-Løve follows up her exquisite semi-autobiographical drama Goodbye First Love (2011) with another coming-of-age story in Eden. Based on the life of her older brother Sven, with whom she co-wrote the script, Hansen-Løve weaves a meandering, intentionally nebulous narrative about a young DJ named Paul (newcomer Félix de Givry), and the underground electronic music scene of Paris. The story, set in the world of sex, drugs, and techno, spans two decades. During this protracted timeframe we distantly observe Paul’s minor successes and major failures, beginning in the early-nineties when he’s a teenager and ending in the late aughts when he looks and acts very much the same as he did at the outset.

Hansen-Løve isn’t one for traditional ideas about film structure. Her ability to capture an uncontrived, “lived in” sense of the passage of time is part of what makes Goodbye First Love so powerful. But this time I question the need for both the two-decade timeline and the 131 minute running time. So much of the picture is relentlessly, numbingly repetitive. Of course the same words perfectly (and not necessarily derogatorily) describe the style of music at the center of this story. One could argue the director has brilliantly expressed her subject’s milieu by creating the cinematic equivalent of house music. However, we can’t lose ourselves in a movie quite as easily as we can fall into a rave trance created by the combination of lights, beats, and recreational pharmaceuticals.  

More problematic: the incurious Paul is a passive and wearisome character, and de Givry is not the kind of actor (or non-actor in this case) who is so captivating and charismatic that we don’t care. Thus, despite the surface similarities, Eden is almost the opposite of Goodbye First Love. That movie explores the rich emotional life of a passionate girl; this one observes the external existence of a rather unfeeling boy. Lola Crèton, an actress whose minimalistic screen presence is endlessly fascinating, plays Goodbye’s Camille; where as Eden’s Paul is embodied by an attractive unknown who lacks the ability to draw the viewer fully in and make us care about him. Both films refuse to allow their protagonists to learn any “life lessons" in the Hollywood sense, but Eden also seems to spurn any deep exploration of the feelings and intricacies of a dynamic and/or artistic life.

At the New York Film Festival, Hansen-Løve claimed she took inspiration for Eden from her husband Olivier Assayas’ own semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film Something In The Air, (2012). That picture perfectly encapsulated a rudderless Parisian generation that was too young to fully participate in the major political revolution of its time. Focusing on the defining times of her brother’s era, Hansen-Løve attempts to create a similar kind of generational portrait film—and, to be fair, in this she succeeds. Unfortunately, Paul's story doesn't really contextualize this period in recent cultural history much beyond the nostalgia it will evoke in those who lived though it. Also, the dance party scene of the nineties and aughts lacks the drama and dynamics of, say, the radical student movement of late sixties Paris that Assayas explored in Something In The Air. By the end of Eden, the director does manage a wistfulness that almost lives up to her title, but don’t believe such a long trip was is required to reach this destination.