SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s elegiac descriptions of the ephemeral, will-o’-the-wisp experience of girlhood have earned her comparisons with Sofia Coppola, and Eden – in which the French director turns her remote gaze on a fading male protagonist – might at first glance appear to be her Somewhere. Tracing, over 20 years, the quietly devastating rise and fall of DJ Paul (Félix de Givry), it certainly works the same show-business territory of hedonism and ennui. Yet for all that the two share an astute attention to surface, Hansen-Løve’s film beds down deeper in its milieu than Coppola’s did. The result is a glorious celebration of the 90s dance scene which, like Hansen-Løve’s breakthrough feature Father of My Children (2009), asks poignant questions about the struggle involved in doing what we love.
Hansen-Løve has described Father of My Children, which was inspired by the suicide of independent producer Humbert Balsan, as the central episode in an autobiographical trilogy bookended by Tout est pardonné (2007) and Goodbye First Love (2011). Each of these films – despite the centrality of middle-aged men to their stories – viewed the narrative through the eyes of adolescent girls. Eden too draws on Hansen-Løve’s life, in that it was co-written by her brother Sven, a former DJ, and is seen from the perspective of his stand-in Paul.
The film begins in November 1992, when Paul is a starry-eyed, soft-edged, pigeon-toed teen, sneaking out to illicit raves in basement dives and warehouses, lured by the siren call of Frankie Knuckles’s now legendary ‘The Whistle Song’. From the opening meet-cute when Paul comes across the track, the first half of the film – entitled ‘Paradise Garage’ – follows his developing romance with garage music (‘a mix of machines and voices’, as he calls it) as he forms a duo with pal Stan, drops out of university and steadily builds up a following.
There are other pulls on Paul’s attention: girls (including awkward Greta Gerwig and firecracker Pauline Etienne) come and go, cocaine is snorted. But first and best is the music, and Hansen-Løve vividly evokes the excitement and freshness of Paul’s early encounters with the scene. In nightclubs, her handheld camera insinuates itself among the crowds, bobbing at shoulder height, swerving and dipping, excitable and distracted. At a party where Paul’s friends Daft Punk – the Bob Dylan to his Llewyn Davis – give birth to electronica, their now classic hit ‘Da Funk’ feels radically new. Likewise Paul and his friends, clad in high-tops and cardigans, racing to phone booths to put in calls to one another, are distinctly of the era. One of Hansen-Løve’s more subtle touches is to mark the passage into the second part of the film, ‘Lost in Music’, not with radical haircuts and makeup but with the gradually increasing presence of cell phones and the shinier skin and shorter skirts of the girls who surround Paul as his music slides up the commercial scale. He, however, changes remarkably little. Indeed, he finishes the film in the same tiny studio apartment where he began, battered, broke and exhausted: the music he loves has grown tired and the crowds have moved on to newer things.
If there’s a question at the film’s core it’s how hard should one work for a dream? When is it time to give up? The film takes pains –occasionally at the expense of narrative thrust – to detail the tedium and sheer graft of the DJ life. Even at the peak of their career, playing parties at New York’s MoMA, Stan and Paul must spend the morning after deflating balloons and sweeping glitter. The characters who exit Eden with their sanity intact are those who get out early – Stan, Paul’s ex Louise – or who get lucky, as the affable pair behind Daft Punk do. Others, such as illustrator Cyril, find themselves consumed, or simply, as in Paul’s case, spent.
At the end, Paul reads a Robert Creeley poem, ‘The Rhythm’, which reflects on the world’s indifference to the individual, describing life as ‘light at the opening, dark at the closing’. It’s a great description of the film itself, and a perfect elegy for the career of so many artists: almost imperceptibly, euphoria cedes to melancholy as newer, fresher pretenders arrive. Yet a reprise of the film’s most upbeat moment sweeps this to one side as the titles come up and we cut to Paul and Louise bouncing and bobbing to a Charles Dockins’ track, fittingly entitled ‘Happy Song’. Tastes change. The beat goes on.
Catherine Wheatley, Sight and Sound, August 2015
Mia Hansen-Løve on Eden’s sound
‘We wanted the music to have a real texture, just as it has in life. To be part of the scenes, and not to be from the outside.’ The director rejected the tendency to submerge the scene in music for a documentary feel in which the tracks ebb and flow, euphoric crowd singalongs often rising up into the sound mix. Dancers and DJs alike are sensitive to room sound, good or bad, and here the audience is made to feel likewise, whether that ‘room’ is a basement dive or a huge outdoor party.
‘Everything is drowned in music,’ Hansen-Løve says of other approaches. ‘It was the one thing we didn’t want to do. Of course, we wanted to have the emotion, the lyricism, the poetry, but I wanted to find it through realism. And to actually do that in a club scene is tough: if you go into a club and take the sound, it is really terrible. If you do it purely realistically, ultimately you won’t show anything because [the sound] is going to be too dirty. To find the right balance was a real challenge that started from the beginning: that’s something we spent half the time thinking about and working on with the sound editors and recordists.’
Mia Hansen-Løve interviewed by Frances Morgan, Sight and Sound, August 2015
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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