Eden
Mia Hansen-Løve (2014)
The Curzon cinemas website advertises Eden with the assurance that ‘Knowledge of the scene or music isn’t essential in order to enjoy the many pleasures of this film’. The scene is clubland, mainly in Paris in the 1990s and 2000s; the music is ‘the French touch’, a form of electronic dance music derived from Chicago house, Euro disco etc. Several critics have commended Mia Hansen-Løve’s film in terms similar to Curzon. Jonathan Romney in the Observer (he’s also written about Eden in Film Comment) declares that ‘Even viewers not initiated in techno and garage arcana are likely to yield to the swimmy rush mustered by the film and its bustling soundtrack’. I think familiarity with and feeling for house-garage-techno is just about essential to getting much out of Eden. This isn’t because the music is difficult to engage with – it’s often pleasant, as background. It’s because viewers for whom the music in a film carries reminiscent and emotional overtones will naturally apply them to what they’re watching; and, in the case of Eden, be able to animate what’s otherwise a vapid drama.
Mia Hansen-Løve co-wrote Eden with her elder brother, Sven, on whom the film’s central character is based. Sven Hansen-Løve, according to his IMDB biography, ‘is an influential French DJ/producer who, with friend and partner, Greg Gauthier, built the Parisian party scene in 1994 …’ There’s an inherent risk with source material of this kind that a film-maker, because the subject of their story is so autobiographically important, won’t put themselves in the position of an uninitiated audience – won’t do enough to bring the material to life for those for whom it has no prior meaning. This seems such an obvious risk that it’s hard to believe it gets ignored but that looks to be what’s happened in Eden. The personal significance of the story to both Hansen-Løves may have aggravated the problem. This sister-brother collaboration could be described as a folie à deux if the phrase didn’t imply an excitation absent from the film. The French touch, on this evidence, isn’t exactly Hi-NRG but it’s virtually the only vitality that Eden has.
As Sven’s alter ego, Paul Vallée, Félix de Givry is blandly good-looking, utterly uninteresting. Nearly a decade after their early 1990s affair in Paris, Paul looks up Julia, an American, while he’s in New York. ‘It’s amazing,’ she tells him, ‘you’ve just not changed at all’. She doesn’t know the half of it. Eden covers more than twenty years of Paul’s life (he’s in his late teens at the start and close on forty by the end). During that time, Félix de Givry grows a bit of facial hair and puts on what looks like a very few pounds in weight. In his New Yorker review, Anthony Lane describes Paul as ‘the Dorian Gray of the French electronic-music scene’. Lane’s tone is (as often) jocose but it’s worth stressing that Paul doesn’t have a picture in the attic – or, as far as one can see from de Givry’s portrait of him, anything else much upstairs. He, with his friend Stan, wants a career promoting the music he loves, as a producer and DJ. Time and tastes move on and Paul’s funds run out. Years of lack of sleep and too much cocaine wear him down. That’s about it. Early on, he explains that he likes house music that combines ‘the robotics of electro with the warmth of soul’; beyond that, we get no insight into Paul’s passion. None of his several relationships with women endures but they’re only a subplot anyway.
There were moments when I wondered if Mia Hansen-Løve, rather than wrongly assuming that a protagonist based on her brother was bound to be interesting, had felt the actor interpreting him could only be a pale shadow of the real thing – so didn’t want him to be a strong presence. Hardly anyone else in Eden is a strong presence either – in fact, de Givry registers more than most, simply because he has so much screen time. Pauline Etienne, who plays Paul’s longest-lasting girlfriend Louise, stands out as the most nuanced member of the European cast. Etienne is relatively experienced: several of the others, including Félix de Givry and Hugo Conzelmann, who plays Stan, made their cinema debut in Something in the Air (2012), directed by Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve’s husband, and haven’t done much else yet. It looks as if Hansen-Løve has encouraged her mostly young actors to underplay for naturalistic effect, a futile exercise because her camera picks up from them not realness but blankness. Scene after scene has a superficially documentary feel but the people on screen are lifeless compared with those you typically meet in a documentary. Sequences involving multiple characters occasionally express a different and presumably unintentional documentary quality: they suggest drama workshop impro – as if Hansen-Løve has told the performers to act, say, wacky and they’re just getting the hang of doing so. Paul is not a demonstrative DJ. I guess that’s meant to denote cool but Félix de Givry looks merely like a mediocre actor pretending, half-heartedly, to be a DJ.
The American ‘guest stars’ in Eden are an interestingly different matter. Greta Gerwig makes three brief appearances as Julia. The second one, in which she speaks to camera the words of the note Julia’s left Paul telling him she’s returned to the US, is hopeless – Gerwig is understandably uncomfortable. But she brings a welcome ambiguity to her other two scenes; you can’t easily read Julia but you do want to know more about her. (The combination of Gerwig’s dynamic eccentricity and having to read lines in English when Paul is talking to Julia sadly exposes Félix de Givry’s limitations, especially in their first scene together.) Brady Corbet, in his one scene as Julia’s partner in New York, brings a similar jolt of life. The American guest stars who aren’t actors – like the house music performers, Arnold Jarvis and La India, who also have cameos – are pretty wooden. They fit more easily into the texture of the film than Gerwig or Corbet.
Mention of Something in the Air – in which Olivier Assayas looked (in autobiographical retrospect) at middle-class French students trying to rekindle the excitement of May 1968 in the years that followed – brings me back to Jonathan Romney, who describes Eden as ‘Flaubert’s Sentimental Education remixed at 130bpm’ and as having:
‘… the classic feel of a French generational portrait – its characters, almost exclusively white and middle-class, could be the same studious idealists seen in other films engaging in Marxist debate or arguing over Cahiers du Cinéma.’
These comments probably don’t deserve to be taken any more seriously than the sound-biting and showing off that they clearly are. But perhaps they hint too at part of the film’s appeal to people other than those to whom the music means plenty – that is, a kind of dim ciné-Francophilia. What’s striking about Paul and his group is that they’re not like the French cinema progenitors with whom Romney compares them. They’re not only politically dégagé; they show a very limited interest, beyond the music they like, in the arts. Some of them are students and Paul languishes at an academic thesis for several years. (He gives up on it – or, at least, his supervisor, whose voice suggests a pompous spoilsport, gives up on Paul.) Once his career in the music world is disintegrating, he joins a creative writing class; there’s mention of Roberto Bolaño and a voiceover reads a Robert Creeley poem in the final scene. In between, there’s a brief debate about Paul Verhoeven’s Razzie-winning Showgirls and one of the other boys creates a comic book (before committing suicide). That’s the extent of the larger cultural life in evidence in the film. For Jonathan Romney, this seems not to matter because the characters are French – they have an inborn touch of intellectual class. If these young people were British or American, the likes of Romney would likely draw attention to their cultural limitations. It’s rather revealing that, in his Film Comment piece, Romney remarks loftily that Eden ‘in no way resembles the sort of dance-scene movie normally made in the US or Britain’. Perish the thought! The Hansen-Løves, to be fair, fully acknowledge the American influence on the French touch. I went to the film assuming it was named for a club in Paris (even a pun on Ecstasy/ecstasy – an E-den) but it seems to be a nod to the Paradise Garage in New York.
27 July 2015