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Eden
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The Test of Time
Eden is a beguiling film, one that I
have felt compelled to watch multiple times – even though there is nothing
exceptionally “strong” in it, no detachable, anthological moments (except maybe
the fervent Showgirls discussion!),
few memorable lines per se. But it
has something, in its steady unfolding, that is quietly gripping.
Many admirers of the film (such as Sarinah Masukor in
her superb LOLA essay) have expressed it well: this portrait
of a particular music scene – the “French touch” variant on the Garage house
era of DJ mixes, from the early 1990s onward, that covered Cheers (one half of
which was the director’s older brother, Sven Hansen-Løve aka Sven Love) and
Daft Punk – finds a tone, an ambience, a drift that meshes perfectly with the sonic material of its subject matter (as
best embodied, here, by Frankie Knuckles’ “The Whistle Song”). It is rare
indeed for mise en scène, narrative
and a very culturally specific soundtrack to fit together so snugly and so
well. Mia Hansen-Løve clearly knows this history intimately, for there are no
false notes in it (usually so common in this type of film).
On this level, it makes for an intriguing double bill with
Michael Winterbottom’s sole excellent (and thoroughly authentic) movie, 24 Hour Party People (2002): different
music (Factory Records), different slice of history (late 1970s to ‘90s), some
similar themes and motifs (success, legacy, personal happiness – and the
problems associated with attaining and keeping any of them). But where
Winterbottom and his writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce rightly seize on a busy,
fragmented, chaotic, mosaic approach, Eden is an altogether more “chill” affair.
Like Ethan Hawke’s underrated Blaze (2018), Eden is, to
a large extent, about those contributors to a cultural scene who do not make it into the big time (as Daft
Punk did), even as they help define and shape it at its origin and core. An all
too familiar tale! It’s a story of gradual losses: passionate relationships
fail, people drop out of the “movement”, some die, some “sell out” to the
mainstream market. Drugs (cocaine being the favourite substance abused here)
and other complications throw spanners in the works. More particularly, the
spectre of “normality” – as defined by the acceptance of jobs, marital
responsibilities, kids – menaces the free-floating, hedonistic, “time standing
still” lifestyle of music and dance and popped-pills in the night, in some
forest far from the Paris centre …
For a while, it all floats along pretty nicely for
everyone involved: Paul (Félix de Givry, who embodies an understated, sometimes
even blank role well – he is called on for pure presence) wanders from one love
affair to another (the women are played by, among others, Laura Smet and
Golshifteh Farahani); the centre of his sentimental life is Louise (Pauline
Étienne). He travels the world – which gives him a chance to catch up with an
American ex, Julia (Greta Gerwig, playing it straight for a change), in Chicago
and New York (Brady Corbet also has a small role there).
Circling Paul is an entire, shifting troupe – some of
its in-and-out members become familiar to us (like the only pop-out “colourful
eccentric” in the bunch, Arnaud played by the patented “excessive” actor-director
Vincent Macaigne), others don’t. There are friends, fans, hangers-on, managers,
producers, technicians … cultural workers of all sorts and also a few
visionaries – predominantly the dour, troubled, seemingly incurable misogynist,
Cyril (Roman Kolinka). One of the points made, in the course of things, is that
the diagnosis of something like depression was so easily lost in the blurry
haze of countercultural fun-times, even in a period as recent as the 1990s.
But Paul, at the centre of this blissful whirl, is
also, increasingly, confronted with the nemeses of destiny: should he have had
children with that woman? Should he have set up a proper business with this
friend? Should he have stuck to his PhD, maybe became a writer? (Sven, in
reality, is now indeed a writer, so there’s a cleverly disguised bildungsroman in filigree here.) Like a
paler, less spectacular inversion of 24
Hour Party People, the good times ride, but the debts abide: problems with
the bank (that damn clerk who enjoys his club freebies too much!), with
equipment, with venues (Hansen-Løve captures, with startlingly charming
accuracy, the wonky audio mix of famous pop-soul singers [La India, Arnold
Jarvis] belting live into a microphone, alone on a makeshift club stage, while
backing tapes play or discs spin … and the crowd eats it up).
The bubble must burst: that could be an image for all
of Hansen-Løve’s cinema to date. Eden expresses,
best of all her films, that tension between the sensation of an “eternal
present” (especially keen in the nightclub world!) – the period of “first
love”, absolute rapture, intoxication, or “One More Time” according to Daft
Punk’s 2000 anthem – and the changes that passing time induces: the veritable
Test of Time. It thus becomes the chronicle of a generation as it weathers the years, decisions, regrets, memories, alterations
of destiny. Ultimately, that spectre of normality registers ambiguously both as
come-down and salvation, boredom and paradise: Hansen-Løve expertly balances
all the emotions in the final scenes, where the merest brush of a new encounter
(with a woman in Paul’s writing class) suggests a different, happier future to
come, while the poem she gives him – Robert Creeley’s “The Rhythm”, both heard
in voice-over and read bilingually on-screen – concludes on a sobering “light at the opening / dark at the closing”.
But there’s also the ecstatic end-credit dance to Charles Dockins’ “Happy
Song”, beyond all narrative time …
Whereas Olivier Assayas sometimes labours to
articulate an earnest, moral philosophy about this human situation of change
(and loss of youthful vitality) in Summer
Hours (2008) or Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Hansen-Løve tends to the less explicitly stated aura of a sagacious flow, harmony or equilibrium – hard-won,
always fragile, constantly threatened – that her characters arrive at: in the
sheltering banalities of daily life, inside traffic or alongside a river, as
the sweet folk music plays … Fashions change, values shift, social priorities
move: Hansen-Løve underscores that without a word, in the indelible image of a
“new wave” on the rise at the end of the period depicted – a female DJ (Clara
Deshayes) fixedly at work, picking up and amplifying the echo of an earlier
character who came and went in a flash …
Eden stays all the way with its lovely
(sometimes seemingly non-stop) Garage soundtrack, and devises (with brilliant
cinematographer Denis Lenoir) a persuasive, elegant camera strategy to bind the
ensemble of the filmic narrative: long, slow movements that find one character
and then another in a crowd, eschewing (as Masukor notes) any ersatz mimicking
of the “subjectivity” of the crazy drug-rave experience. It’s a different, more
mellow kind of euphoria registered here. Incessant travelling motion – in cabs,
on foot and (in an echo of Irma Vep [1996]) in duo
on motorbike – draws its own dreamy itinerary. Languorous scene transitions,
set to slow cross-fades of the music tracks, help stretch out the mood ably. There
is a mellow, slightly detached and distanced perspective here (the director,
tellingly, only glancingly depicts herself, as the hero’s “little sister”, a
couple of times, and usually in the home setting).
Hansen-Løve and Assayas (they were a couple at this
time) form the beachhead, in international cinema, of an approach we could name Bressonian naturalism. That is to
say, the narrative form is primarily elliptical in the Bressonian manner (major
events are skipped or downplayed); but this overarching structure does not come
accompanied (as is almost always the case) with a correspondingly severe or
spare stylisation of speech, gesture, posture, framing and sound design.
Hansen-Løve and Assayas opt, instead, for a naturalistic flow of behaviour and
performance – often in a low or understated key, but basically realistic and
believable in its details.
This Bressonian naturalism can seem (certainly to
some, uneasy viewers, especially the self-appointed “disciples” of Bresson) as
a contradiction in terms – although (thankfully) there is no law that dictates
how style and subject should correspond in every single instance of cinema. In
essence, both Hansen-Løve and Assayas aim for an effect of de-dramatisation, of non-melodrama (non-theatrical, non-histrionic)
– even when potentially melodramatic events (such as suicide, abortion, betrayal
or murder) punctuate the story. But this particular patina of deliberate flatness derives from an overall
treatment of the construction, pacing and “pitch” of the film (its “tuning”),
rather than the moment-to-moment work on the shots.
Scenes too, certainly in Hansen-Løve, are rarely
virtuosic or exhibitionistic on any level: a neat bit of social mise en scène revealing how two people
say goodbye to each other in a car is a subtle exception to this quasi-Bressonian
rule. In all, this manifestation of Bressonian naturalism an intriguing
experiment, and one that Hansen-Løve has stuck to (in her prior and subsequent
films, such as Things to Come [2016])
more faithfully than the eclectic, skittish, genre-drawn Assayas. The editing
of Marion Monnier (for these two directors as well as Mikhaël Hers, Éléna Klotz
and even Larry Clark on The Smell of Us [2015]) is clearly crucial to the experiment’s success, when it works.
Eden does not entirely avoid the
all-too-common traps of heavy thematic signposting, even “editorialising”. That
Cyril (modelled on the graphic novelist Mathias Cousin) is headed for long
bouts of depression, and finally worse, is flagged from almost his first
gloomy, withdrawn, spikey appearance. Likewise, Paul’s looming drug problem
within the wild DJ world is announced upfront by … his mother (Arsinée Khanjian)
– perhaps the attempt there was to somehow dodge cliché precisely by
incarnating the worst and most obvious cliché!
Such are the inevitable narrational, organisational
problems and challenges inherent in the “chronicle of a generation” form. But
Hansen-Løve in Eden gives this form
one of the brightest and most soulful moments in its cinematic history.
© Adrian Martin February/March 2020 |
