Eden (伊甸園)

After a dozen of so of films, one after another, one begins to lose track and snippets from different films begin to flood one's mind in no particular order. This weird feeling becomes 甸even most pronounced when one sees a film whose images appear like an almost continuous stream of rapidly jumping disco scenes in which one sees various figures frozen in different dancing postures before rapidly sinking back into total darkness every second or two amidst the deafening din of heavy rhythms and in the case of the kind of disco sound produced by   
Paul Vallée (Félix de Givry) in the fourth feature directed and co-written by Mia Hansen-Løve's 131 minutes "Eden" (2014)

Eden tracks the rise and fall of the Paul, a French disco DJ, founder of the type of disco sound called "Garage " popular in the 1980s and dying out in the early 2000s. It's a kind of sound which as Paul explains, is a mix between "euphoria and melancholy": heavy lively rave rhythm interspersed with quieter, slow, dreamy and sad blues-like sound. The camera follows very closely the diurnal rhythm of the life of Paul, with constant changes of venues between a sort of communal hostel between his core group of close friends all involved in the disco business in one capacity or another, his exploration of different kinds of vinyl bluesy sound to be mixed into the regular disco sound, his stints at Radio FG, his need to organize special events to suit the fickle tastes and moods teenagers and those who refuse exit from that cocooned stage of their development in Paris or some gigs in New York, his need for cocaine to produce the kind of euphoric "feel" which he tried so hard to mimmick with sound, his volatile relationships with first one girl Julia (Greta Gerwig) from America, Louise (Pauline Etienne)  and then another Yasmin (Golshifteh Farahani). He lives in a the world of the imagination, a life which is by no means easy. His best friend, a cartoon artist committed suicide the moment his first full length book was out. In the end, the reality of having to earn sufficient to keep body and soul together forces him to quit the kind of life he feels comfortable with and to take a more conventional and dreary job. As the film closes, he was seen exploring another kind of adventure of the spirit, attending a course on writing skills, presumably hoping thereby to strike out into a new direction to continue his exploration of this world and that of his own interior life and a new girl appear to take a "special" interest in him as a person.

         

It's a fairly long film which captures beautifully the kind of world in which the simple, quiet, laid back, friendly, dedicated Paul moves around, breathes, loves, wracks his brain for new ideas in the kind of music that fascinates him and helps to give shape to his moods, feels frustration, takes drugs, basks in fleeting moments of glory as he mixes in the his special touch of a bit dreamy, sad and strangely soothing sounds amidst the cheers, yells, fights in the clubs and garage discos where tens and hundreds of people on the way to adulthood find a temporary refuge which they hope will insulate them for a while, like an anodyne or a magic spell, from the pressures of an increasingly monotonous and dreary contemporary life where everything and everyone looks more and more alike and the space for individuality dwindles with each mass produced product. I like in particular the sensitive camera work of Denis Lenoir, his beautiful use of light, hues and colors and the electronic music supervised by Raphael Hamburgher without whose work the film could never have been as enjoyable as it was and without whom I would have missed out on a glimpse at that kind of life led by a whole generation of much younger people. The director really knows about that kind of life because her brother is one of the DJs belonging to that generation and her sympathetic, non-judgmental, purely descriptive yet not entirely detached style.