"Eden" is Mia Hansen-Love's lovely ode to youth and music and while it may be one of the best French films of recent years it's hardly known at all. It's a youth movie in which the youths keep getting older, beginning in the early nineties and following Paul, (a marvellous Felix De Givry), and his friends through the music scenes of the period, (and there's some fabulous music to be heard), as he decides that his true vocation in life is as a DJ. In dramatic terms not a great deal happens, (though there is a suicide). Hansen-Love's style is observational and this is a slow-burn of a movie, perhaps too slow for the audiences that stayed away.
These characters' lives drift by but they're mostly such good company you're happy to spend time with them and amongst the almost exclusively French cast are Greta Gerwig, (as one of Paul's many lovers), and Brady Corbett and despite moving from Paris to New York and Chicago and back, this is a very French film. Hip Parisiennes just seem that much smarter than their counterparts elsewhere even if the drugs and the sex and the music are the same or maybe it's just hip Parisiennes all tend to be intellectuals. But you don't have to be an intellectual to enjoy this movie and, as I discovered, you don't even have to be young.
These characters' lives drift by but they're mostly such good company you're happy to spend time with them and amongst the almost exclusively French cast are Greta Gerwig, (as one of Paul's many lovers), and Brady Corbett and despite moving from Paris to New York and Chicago and back, this is a very French film. Hip Parisiennes just seem that much smarter than their counterparts elsewhere even if the drugs and the sex and the music are the same or maybe it's just hip Parisiennes all tend to be intellectuals. But you don't have to be an intellectual to enjoy this movie and, as I discovered, you don't even have to be young.