French director Mia Hansen-Løve is one of the most ambitious filmmakers working today, trading in themes that are nearly universal yet difficult to articulate. Goodbye First Love (2011) isn’t about the loss of innocence so much as how one feels losing his innocence. Employing a rich, subtle cinematic language, one rooted in jump cuts and confident, sweeping camera movements, Hansen-Løve renders almost palpable the sensation of time slipping away. Her fourth feature, Eden, does this in the service of yet another complicated emotion—the longing for transcendence. The hero, Paul (Félix de Givry in his acting debut), spends almost two decades searching for self-actualization through music—specifically “garage,” a subgenre of French and American techno—though Eden is less about him than about the life and death of his dream. As Paul says of a favorite song, the movie hovers between euphoria and melancholy.
Throughout Eden, Hansen-Løve finds ways to convey Paul’s garage-induced rapture and his simultaneous disappointment that the rapture can’t last. The movie’s first half, covering Paul’s teens and 20s, is marked by nearly constant camera movement, creating a lyrical sense of progression similar to that of his favorite songs. Hansen-Løve frequently carries over songs from one scene to the next, suggesting that the music has an internal continuity independent of the plot, and she allows the narrative focus within a scene to drift from Paul to one of the supporting characters, making him seem like a guest in his own story, carried along by events as well as music. Her unpredictable edits move the story forward by weeks or years without warning, making you feel constantly that you’ve just missed something.
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
