Oh, to have been young and French at the dawn of the Parisian house music scene, when Daft Punk were but a glint on a robot’s headpiece. Eden is a fictionalised account of those days from Mia Hansen-Løve, based on the experiences of her brother and co-writer Sven Hansen-Løve, a DJ and scenester reincarnated here as Paul (Félix de Givry). Much more expansive than Hansen-Løve’s previous pieces (Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love), Eden spans 20 years and depicts a life as exalted as the title suggests. 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.
It’s a tender film with a piquant thread of humour – a running gag has the two dweeby types who became Daft Punk (played by Vincent Lacoste and Arnaud Azoulay) turned away at clubs because no one believes it’s them. But rather than focusing on these hitmakers, Eden is about the kids who stayed up all night but didn’t get lucky, brought down to earth by the harsher realities of the life ecstatic.
Eden has 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. It’s hardly even: Greta Gerwig contributes a very shaky cameo, while spiky up-and-comer Pauline Etienne makes more of a mark than the dour de Givry. There’s little narrative as such; characters come and go without ceremony; the action skips years at a time, seemingly at random. But that’s part of Eden’s magic: it evokes the thrill of losing yourself as time speeds on, with little regard for the reality principle. It’s a beautiful, evocative essay on youth and experience, like Flaubert’s Sentimental Education remixed at 130bpm.
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