The Romantic poets, morosely fixated on the ephemerality of all things, placed great importance on man’s initial fall from grace, eating from the tree of knowledge and getting booted out of the garden as a result. For them, Eden was a prison rather than a paradise, a nursery of docile pleasures that presented no challenges to its naked inhabitants. Only in dirtying himself through sin did man enter the real world, gaining awareness and intelligence while also dooming himself to toil and death. There’s a similar ambivalence expressed in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, which imagines a dreamy world of house parties, club shows and recreational drugs as its own kind of nocturnal utopia, a haven for the disaffected and the out-of-place in which everyday concerns are drowned out by music and lights.
These qualities, however, have far less power in the light of day, viable in small doses but not a suitable foundation for life. Opening in 1992, the film traces two decades in the world of the French dance music scene, following a small crew of dreamers who seek to make partying a full-time occupation. The story is based on the semi-fictionalized youth of the director’s brother Sven, who earned a co-writer credit on the film. Developing his DJ career as half of the duo Cheers, Paul Vallée starts off as an outsider amid a world of outsiders, inspired by American-style Garage over the house music favored by many of his peers. Paul and his friends end up part of a new hybrid scene known as “French Touch,” gigging around Paris and abroad and building up a seemingly solid career. Portrayed by Félix de Givry, Paul is baby-faced and skinny, youthful qualities that become mocking reminders as he straggles into his thirties, failing to mature.
Like Løve’s previous movie, the similarly time-focused Goodbye, First Love, this is a film defined by its ellipses, broad stretches of empty space that are as significant, if not more so, than the action which occurs onscreen. The snippets of story that do appear are capsular and cyclical, concerning the same repeating conflicts and struggles, the growing burden of time passed progressively raising the stakes. Paul moves through a series of different girlfriends and plays shows in New York and Chicago but always returns to the same small, threadbare apartment, its lack of decoration indicating his unwillingness to put down roots. This gradual process of subtle disintegration moves Eden from a pleasant, seemingly weightless party movie to a melancholy chronicle of vanished youth, as enthusiasm ebbs, characters disappear and illicit substances take on more of the load.
Against the static rhythms of 4/4 beats and looped breakdowns, the film depicts characters trying to stay the same while the world changes around them. A distinct line is drawn between competent DJs capable of entertaining crowds and earning enough cash to survive, and the visionaries who push the genre forward. Such figures are exemplified here by the members of Daft Punk, who appear early on as just another pair of enterprising teenagers, disappearing from the film as they ascend to international fame, repeatedly reinventing themselves along the way. Before long they’re reduced to a parade of songs appearing diegetically on the soundtrack, their new music commenting on the circumstances of the characters they’ve left behind, stranded on the shoals of this mournful story about the importance, and danger, of dreams.