New York Film Festival 2014

[Chris Knipp]

EUGÈNE GREEN: LA SAPIENZA (2014)


LUDOVICO SUCCIO AND FABRIZIO RONGIONE IN LA SAPIENZA

Green's beautiful but stilted Italian travelogue about couples and architecture is weighed down by its lugubrious dialogue

An American who has adopted France as his country, Eugène Green (the accent grave evidently part of his acclimatization) is an accolyte of the venerable Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira; he's even gone so far as to shoot a film (his 2009 The Portuguese Nun) on Oliveira's home turf. La Sapienza, which has a lot about space, light, and baroque architecture, particularly that of Francesco Borromini, has plenty to offer if you're looking for handsome photography of seventeenth-century Italian buildings. But the people, simpering sourpusses who stare at the camera and slowly mouth lugubrious inanities at each other, have considerably less to offer. Green also owes debts to Rivette and Resnais, and this film could be taken as a variation on Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad -- only one where instead of remembered trysts at a haunting chateau, the focus is on couples therapy for a Swiss architect and his wife, which comes about through meeting young Italian siblings near Lago Maggiore, where Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman) go so Alexandre can study the aforesaid Borromini.

The couple meets 19-year-old Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), coincidentally himself an aspiring architecture student, as he's holding up his sister Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), who's just collapsed from one of her periodic fits of weakness. Aliénor befriends Lavinia and has daily chats with her in French while the girl recuperates, and Alexandre takes Goffredo for a day or two on an architectural study trip to Turin. Goffredo winds up being Alexandre's teacher, explaining to him that architecture is all about space and light. And light has something to do with love: it sounds like Green has dipped into Dante's Paradiso. Reference is also made to the idea of "sapienza," which in theology is an attribute of God that manifests itself in the creation and governing of the world. The name also refers to one of Borromini's masterpieces, the Church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome.

The film offers hints throughout about how architecture might be better integrated with society and readapted for humane use. When Eliénor is by herself one evening a ruddy-faced man with long gray hair (Green himself) appears on a bench speaking French with an odd accent (and the same lugubrious tongue in slo-mo of everyone else) with a monologue about how he is a Chaldean from Iraq who speaks Aramaic and whose people and culture are disappearing. At the beginning and end of the film in its only music an a capella choir sings some lovely baroque compositions. The promise to reveal mysteries behind the couple's failed marriage is fulfilled, and it's hinted that the hitherto symbiotic Goffredo and Lavinia will fare better apart. In an Italian essay online Roberta Scorranese explains that this process refers to an idea of Nietzsche's about how one must not remain too attached to another person, even whom one loves. Obviously the intellectual underpinnings of Green's new film are elaborate. It's too bad the film itself is so stilted, slow, and irritating. Despite the architectural travelogue Green overwhelmingly tells rather than shows; he often seems outright to be delivering a lecture. Despite its stylistic homages to those masters, La Sapienzal lacks the elegance of Resnais and Rivette, or Oliveira's ability to bemuse and enchant. One can apply to this new film what Jay Weissberg said of The Portuguese Nun in Variety: it "uses a distended artificiality likely to produce far more giggles than intended."

La Sapienza, 100 mins., debuted at Locarno 9 August 2014, and is also included at Rio, Toronto, Vancouver, and London, represented at Toronto by Kino Lorber. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

JOSH & BENNY SAFDIE: HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT (2014)


Caleb Landry Jones and Arielle Holmes in Heaven Knows What

Druggie street kids' New York romance realistically dramatizes the mess, lacks depth or context

Judging by their semi-autobiographical Daddy Longlegs, the New York indie filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie just don't do "calm." In their new feature Heaven Knows What the young street heroin addicts live hour-by-hour, not day-by-day, and never take a break. They always have "a lot to do." All this energy: they could be working on Wall Street. And high stakes stock brokers do lots of drugs too! There is intensity and a lot of accomplishment observable in Heaven Knows What. The lingo is right, the milieus are real, many of the "actors," including Arielle Holmes, whose serial Apple Store outpourings of jotted memoirs this is based on, are playing grimly accurate versions of themselves. The grayish cinematography with extensive use of long lenses creates a vérité intimacy that sucks you in. Yet compared to work like Martin Bell's '84 documentary classic Streetwise, this docudrama feels like a blitz tour, a drug variation on poverty porn, a choppy collection of riffs that follow its street addict crew, Harley, Ilya, Mike, Skully, Isaac and a few others, around and around -- without penetrating deeply into personalities or lives. The film drags our noses in the dirt, but we are not enlightened or touched.

Streetwise grew out of more than a year's work by Bell's wife Mary Ellen Mark getting to know the Seattle street kids. Those black and white images stay etched on one's mind; the documentary brought them to life. The result may fill you with sadness but there is no sense of an effort to shock. Watching Heaven Knows What, one feels this is an artifact that, if not purposely designed, nonetheless is ideally suited, to épater la bourgeoisie, but not shock them with poetry like the French 19th-century decadents. To shock them with mess, with lives carelessly thrown away. This is voyeuristic stuff Larry Clark would have made sexier, KIds with less plot and colder weather. Heightening the harshness, it all happens in a few days in the dead of winter.

The film came from a chance encounter the Safdie brothers tell of with a pretty girl named Arielle Holmes working as a temp in the New York diamond district. They talked to her, tried to get her a job in a video, thenn learned she was homeless and a heroin addict. They got her to write about her life and decided to make a movie out of it with their collaborator Ronald Bronstein, with Arielle playing herself. The center of the story was her romance with Ilya, a self-centered, mean loner whose provocations and rejections apparently only fueled her devotion. The film begins with a reenactment of Harley's (Arielle's) suicide attempt. She slashes her wrist in a kind of protest at Ilya's indifference. The opening scene is shot in the New York Public Library using long lenses. Instead of being pushed to care, Ilya only dares Harley to do it. So she does, and goes to the psychiatric hospital.

To play Ilya, because the Safdies thought he was a self-dramatizing character, they found a professional actor, Caleb Landry Jones, who took on the job with potentially dangerous risk-taking commitment to authenticity. Another character, Skully, who goes around with Haley after she's released with her wrist stitched, is played by an underground rapper, Neecro. Most of the others are non-actors.

There is a kind of shape that emerges: the doomed love story. Harley (Arielle) even writes long poetical declarations of eternal devoction to Ilya. The real Ilya was around as the shooting went on and OD'ed and had to be revived in a fast food restaurant; Caleb Landry Jones's Ilya OD's too, and is revived by Harley. She goes around with him again, and he hides her duffle bag for laughs. They kiss, and they take a bus to go south, but he abandons her. She has taken up with drug dealer Mike (Buddy Duress, a real street person, and the most articulate character), and after all the shooting up, the begging for money ("spanging"), pilfering and reselling stuff from drugstores, sleeping in shared apartments, and all the rest, Harley winds up back with Mike, and the togetherness of the street addicts, who fight but hug and call each other "bro."

Apart from the committed performances, in Arielle's case reenactments, there are certainly things that work: the Safdie brothers may be being more misguided or superficial than in the case of their richer, more complex and autobiographical Daddy Longlegs, but they are still strongly committed to honing their craft. Even if it would have been better to step back to take a breath and provide perspectives, Heaven Knows What does have a clean, tight structure, the "miracle of economy" in editing and storytelling noted by Noel Murray in The Dissolve. The first great thing you notice about the film is Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, with its cloudy pale ugly-beautiful capturing of the street that is very consistent and very limber. What is not so great is the much-admired-by-some and sometimes -- even from the first minutes -- extremely obtrusive electronic synthesizer Debussy by Isao Tomita, sub-Philip Glass at best.

Heaven Knows What, 93 mins., debuted at Venice. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release 29 May 2015 (Landmark Sunshine NYC). Metacritic rating 76% (based on only 7 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY

ETHAN HAWKE: SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (2014)


Seymour Bernstein in recital at 85 in Seymour: An Introduction

A film that fell into Ethan Hqwke's lap turns out to be a master class in classical piano and living an integrated life

Actor, director, and writer Ethan Hawke's debut as a documentary filmmaker focuses on a classical pianist turned teacher, the preturnaturally calm and highly articulate 85-year-old Seymour Bernstein, who played piano as a little boy, and began teaching it at fifteen, then after a successful career of touring and playing as a classical pianist, in disaffection with the pressures and commercialism, retired at fifty to devote himself to teaching and composing. He has also poured his wisdom into two books, With Your Own Two Hands: Self-Discovery Through Music (1981), and Twenty Lessons in Keyboard Choreography (1991).

Hawke chose Bernstein as an exemplary man, one with balance in his life, and seeks to show this in his loving portrait. This film portrait lays out aspects of Bernstein's present and past life, his working methods, memories of studying piano with Clara Husserl, serving in the US Army during the Korean War; richly informative moments with piano students. Hawke even persuaded him to play a private concert, which he took very seriously, practicing for many hours in preparation. The film is meant as a tribute, but as Justin Chang put it in his admiring Telluride review for Variety, "happily sidesteps any vanity-project pitfalls." It does, because it is cannily edited.

Hawke's project grew out of meeting him at a private dinner party. He was struck by the older man's instant grasp of his career anxieties and painful stage fright, and getting to know him better, knew a film should be made about him. Bernstein, who had suffered from performance nerves himself, helped coach Hawke on how to deal with them and at the same time come to understand them as an inevitable part of the seriously committed performer's life. Seymour isn't very much in favor of the high-speed classical solo touring life. He thinks it warps people. Somewhat illogically, since Glenn Gould retired early from concertizing himself, he comments that Gould was a total neurotic -- but a genius of enormous technical skill. But he thinks it odd Gould is famous for Bach because when he hears Gould play Bach he hears Gould, not Bach (others would differ).

Most importantly, Seymour speaks for, and emerges as an example of, music as a part of an integrated emotional life.

While Hawke admits he had no desire to make a documentary, and this topic just fell into his lap, and while superficially it is much like many another New York music and arts film that might be shown on PBS, it's a classical piano fan's delight. Watching Seymour coach numerous students, and particularly doing a master class at NYU, one learns far more than usual about the art of piano -- the way Seymour coaches students to craft a musical line shows he is a splendid teacher. When he consents to play a recital for Ethan Hawke's LAByrinth Theater Company, it's given at the rotunda of Steinway Hall and we see Seymour chose the right piano. (This may recall a long-ago film about the young Gould doing the same thing.), and the film climaxes with excerpts of the recital, cunningly edited to show Seymour practicing for the performance and commenting in detail on several passages.

Reminiscences by Seymour fill in background about his studies with Sir Clifford Curzen (whose knighthood he may have helped bring about); his early life in a musicless home, with a father who did not understand his becoming a pianist; and moving recollections of his stint as a soldier (and performer) in the Korean War. Conversations with special friends like New York Times writer and pianist Michael Kimmelman help to dot the i's and cross the t's about Seymour's ideas about performing, music, and life. Justin Chang: "The great classical pianist ... is as graceful a speaker as he is a musician, and his voice rings out with wondrous depth and clarity."

The title is an unacknowledged reference to J.D. Salinger's late Glass family short story of the same name.

Seymour: An Introduction, 81 mins., debuted at Telluride last month, and showed shortly thereafter at Toronto. Sundance Selects acquired the US distribution rights. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where it shows 27 Sept. 2014.

Opens in theaters starting 13 March 2015 in NYC (Lincoln Plaza and IFC Center) and in LA..

SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY.

Seymour: An Introduction is presented as part of the NYFF's accompanying "Spotlight on Documentary" sidebar series, which also includes Scorsese and David Tedeschi's The 50-Year Argument, about The New York Review of Books; recent MacArthur Foundation Award winner Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (a sequel to his The Act of Killing); the Maysle brothers' Iris, about a fashion maven; and Frederick Wiseman’s first film about a museum, National Gallery. The NYFF is strong on documentaries this year, including additionally in its Main Slate both Nick Broomfeld's Tales of the Grim Sleeper; and, as a late addition, the world premiere of Laura Poitras' Citizenfour, an inside account of Edward Snowden's NSA spying revelations. Seymour: An Introduction holds its own very well among these titles.

(At the Q&A after the press screenin the film's subject, now 87, proved to be as calm, wise and articulate as he was on screen.)

[Chris Knipp]

ABEL FERRARA: PASOLINI (2014)


WILLEM DAFOE IN PASOLINI

Tragedy by the beach: Ferrara films the genius, politics, and tragedy of Pasolini

Legendary Italo-American indie rebel Abel Ferrara and his career, some think, slipped into in a black hole some years ago. His dubious end-of-the-world film 4:44 Last Day on Earth (NYFF 2011) might have stood as his only decent effort in a decade. His 2004 Go Go Tales (NYFF 2007), the same blasphemous Italian critic holds, is be remembered chiefly for featuring Asia Argento French-kissing a rottweiler. Welcome to New York, Ferrara's very recent straight-to-Internet reenactment of the DSK scandal by Gérard Depardieu, scarcely gets mentioned. Given all that, Ferrara's Pasolini is a surprisingly class act. It comes with high level government sponsorship from Italy, France, and Belgium. Its tech credts are quality, its look spare and formally elegant. It's both thought-provoking and touching. Its tragedy creeps up on you, through an uneven, more conceptual first half to a more conventional but still haunting conclusion. Ferrara avoids biopic conventions, but he provides the ritual depiction of the last days and death, and Pasolini's murder is an essential moment, brutal, sudden, premature, and perhaps inevitable, as well as long investigated, debated and puzzled over, a death that is more than usually part of the life.

"Prismatic portrait," the festival blurb calls this short "non-linear" film about Pier Paolo Pasolini's last days. That is one way of explaining the somewhat disjointed and puzzling jumble of early sequences, requireing intimate knowledge of the biography and history to decode. Particularly puzzling to non-initiates might be scenes of Pasolini's fictional double from a novel, the “Carlo” character (Roberto Zibetti). But this is also a film which settles down into a fairly powerful finale of the writer/poet/filmmaker's doomed, violent end and those who mourn it whose elegiac final moments, enhanced by a soaring rendition of Rossini's "Una voce poco fa" by Maria Callas in her prime, take one seamlessly from squalor to grandeur. (Pasolini had filmed Callas in his not wholly successful Media. This film does not mention his brilliantly innovative late triumphs, the storytelling trilogy of The Canturbury Tales, Decameron, and Thousand and One Nights, preferring to refer straight off with clips of his last cinematic work, the shocking (and horrifying) Salo. Willem Dafoe, speaking mostly English (in scenes where others speak Italian) is restrained and convincing, given that it's hard to play a genius and a cultural icon. With many references to Pasolni's unfinished novel Petrolio, we also get a (partly) dignified and touching appearance from Pasolini's friend and star, Ninetto Davoli, and a current actor he'd probably have liked to film, the ice-blue-eyed heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio. Davoli plays Epifanio, character in a dreamed-of film Pasolini never got to make. Scarmarcio plays the young Davoli. They appear in a visionary finale combining a gay and lesbian "Sodom" and a fruitless climb to Paradise.

Meanwhile, Pasolini, depicted by the equally craggy-faced and darkly spectacled Dafoe, lives with his mother (the extraordinary and legendary Adriana Asti), and gives interviews. Outside, Ferrara frames Rome with striking (if heavyhandedly repeated) images of sky and Fascist architectural monuments and heroic sculptures, while providing hints of lurking fascist and homophobic street toughs. Pasolini spent the last hours of his life with an angel-faced apprentice mechanic he picked up among "ragazzi di vita" on the street. He takes him to dinner (spaghetti and chicken) in a favorite trattoria where he is known and welcomed at all hours, then he drives him in his Alfa Veloce to the beach at Ostia, where he performs fellatio and then they walk to the beach for more sex and then the toughs come and beat the poet and beleaguered cultural hero to death, with the boy he picked up joining in. It has been debated whether this was a spontaneous act of brutish homophobia or a paid-for execution by right-wing elements made to look like that.

If fellatio and a brutal murder can be tasteful this film is tasteful, but there is much to question too, particularly the dubious sub-Caligula Sodom sequence with sex to the chant of “Cazzo! Figa! Vaffanculo!” and departures from accurate representation of Pasolini's actual biographical details. Italian viewers have difficulty accepting the shifts back and forth between English and Italian and the American actor in the key role. And not just Italians: Peter Debruge (who much admires the orgy scene) wrote in Variety that "The brilliance of stunt casting Willem Dafoe as the controversial Italian director backfires when he opens his mouth to speak." But open-minded Italian viewers can appreciate the Italo-American Ferrara's having the boldness to tread where an Italian could not even in representing Pasolini -- as well as his focusing much, as Federico Gironi noted in a recent review, not on Pasolini and the past but Pasolini as he would view the future, and us. (Pasolini opens in Italy 25 September 2014. It debuted at Venice, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.)

Pasolini, 86 mins., will also be shown at Toronto, Deauville, San Sebastián, Busan, and London.

[Chris Knipp]

MATÍAS PIÑEIRO: THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (2014)



The Shakespeare game

Young Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro is fond of stories with multiple young women and plots in which events in a Shakespeare play and everyday cast interact. This is his third; the first was Rosalinda. In The Princess of France, his typically short fifth feature, he continues to work the same themes and gestures with proto-auteurist intensity (and even greater repetitiveness). Alas, the "jolt" I spoke of in reviewing his last film, Viola (ND/NF 2013), hasn't come -- that a writing fellowship at NYU might jar him out of his hermetic, self-indulgent -- if unquestionably smart and internally consistent -- world; that he would stop being (as Mike D'Angelo put it speaking of Viola) "content to merely float a few intriguing ideas rather than diligently follow through on any aspect in particular"; that he might produce something with appeal outside the cozy limits of festival admiration.

Alas, this doesn't appear to have happened. If anything The Princess of France may be even harder to follow and to like than Viola. It revolves around Victor (Julián Larquier Tellarini), a young director (he still looks pimply, and his deep voice sounds like it recently changed) who comes back to Buenos Aires after a year away following his father's death and some time in Mexico. A bevy of young woman, conveniently all actresses, are both linked with Victor through theater work and personally interested in him; and there's one poor underused male actor, and perhaps rival for the women, Guillermo (Pablo Sigal). Given Victor's very unappealing looks, it's puzzling how fascinating all the women find him, and how often they let him kiss them on the mouth. Bu then they, members of Piñeiro's regular company of players, are no great beauties themselves. Anyway meet Victor's girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), who's pledged to be loyal; his sometime lover Ana (María Villar), who's not convinced he loves her; his ex, Natalia (Romina Paula), who thinks he still loves her; his friend Lorena (Laura Paredes), who hopes he will come back to her; and newly hired Carla (Elisa Carricajo), a complete stranger who might be his real next love. Victor has gotten a commission to do a radio version of Love's Labor Lost. Everyone is involved.

The dialogue is loud and rapid-fire, particularly when Victor is on screen, which is mostly. Piñeiro likes several things going on at once, as when in this film and Viola, the line between the action in a Shakespeare play and the interaction of the players is blurred. The film begins with a loud rendition of a composition by Felix Mendelssohn while we are made to watch a football match on a cement court from high above, so it looks like a diagram or a computer game. Piñeiro is also fond of alternate takes, where, for instance, Victor and one of the women treat each other quite differently the second time than they did in the first. He also provides a short alternate ending, in which Victor tells a woman "I love you," and they have a long kiss. This kind of thing can be amusing in the right context, but it can also make one think the filmmaker is only playing with his characters, and with us.

The repetitions can simply seem annoying and pointless, as when Victor has his only male actor for the radio play repeat the same short passage of Shakespeare (translated into Spanish, of course, and read with an Argentinian accent) five times, and each reading sounds exactly the same as the last. And the extremely verbose rapid-fire dialogue, requiring non-Spanish speakers to spend most of their time struggling to keep up with the subtitles, many of them translating Spanish translations of Shakespeare back into English, adds to the challenge but not to the pleasure. An oddity in the radio play, fruit no doubt of the director's tendency to work from a small casting pool, is that the women's voices all sound rather alike.

Piñeiro is enormously clever and academy-friendly: the scenes are readymade for film students armed with DVDs to pour over and write analyses of. But his work seems increasingly repetitious -- overall, as well as in part -- and ultimately cold. It begins to feel mechanical, self-satisfied, and unappealing. The reward is puzzlement rather than delight. This is not very solid stuff; Piñeiro provides themes, echoes, and tropes, but his plot line is a will-o-the-wisp. Yet this is also material that, with a few alterations, in the hands of a director with a gift for comedy like Frank Capra or George Cukor could be light, charming and accessible. It doesn't look like that's going to happen with this filmmaker, however.

The Princess of France/La Princessa de Francia, 70 mins., debuted at Locarno and has played or is scheduled for Rio, Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, and it was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival where it plays on 5 and 6 October 2014. Cast list. Dp: Fernando Lockett.

[Chris Knipp]

ALAIN RESNAIS: LIFE OF RILEY/AIMER, BOIRE ET CHANTER (2014)


ANDRÉ DUSSOLLIER IN LIFE OF RILEY/AIMER, BOIRE ET CHANTER

Farcical intrigue pursued right up to a lighthearted death

Alain Resnais' last film -- the prolific French director died six months ago at 92 -- is adapted from a British comedy by the equally prolific Alan Ayckbourn called Relatively Speaking. This is Resnais' third adaptation of an Ayckbourn play, after the 1993 Smoking/No smoking and the 2006 Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs), and seems the most sparkling and accessible and enjoyable of the three. It is not a final testament or film farewell, even though it revolves around an unseen main character, George Riley, who has cancer and has been given six months to live. Even if the director knew he would soon die, as he well might, at 91, this is simply light entertainment; and Resnais was working on another film before he passed away. If may seem mildly avant-garde to shoot a play so it looks so much like a play; Resnais courted artificiality and spliced avant-garde formalism onto popular culture in much of his work. He does so particularly entertainingly here. As adapted, the play feels like a French boulevard comedy (but as theTélérama critic points out, without the slammed doors), with its farcical confusion of wives of friends and ex-wife and girlfriend all of whom Riley convinces he's inviting on a vacation to the Canary Islands, when he actually goes with a sixteen-year-old girl, Tilly. That action is kept simple but it's offset by the wit of the other situation: everyone is rehearsing the amateur production of a play, which George is enlisted to play in too -- they calculate that he will live to perform in it. In the first scene, the breakfast conversation between Colin and his wife Kathryn is bizarrely artificial, and we learn they are actually rehearsing their lines in the play.

The cast consists of Resnais regulars, all actors with a lot of experience on the French stage as well as in films. The emphasis is on their skillful work. This is really just a filming of rudimentary sets. Jerry-built houses are fronted by draped cloth in place of windows and doorways. Films of English landscape near York, the play's setting, are shown, with dissolves into clever and more complete drawings of the houses of the various characters, which then dissolve into closeups of the simple sets with two or four actors speaking. Sabine Azéma (Resnais' wife) is married to doctor Hippolyte Girardot; Caroline Sihol is married to George's childhood friend Michel Vuillermoz, who has become rich; Sandrine Kiberlain has left George and gone to live with a farmer, André Dussollier (underused here). Sandrine Kiberlain and Caroline Silhol are experienced thespians but welcome new faces in the Resnais "troupe," the rest are longtime regulars.

Life of Riley/Aimer, boire et chanter, 107 mins., debuted at Berlin in February 2014 and opened in France in March (AlloCiné press rating: 3.7), playing at many international festivals. It was screened fort this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. Showing at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas NYC from 24 October 2014.

[Chris Knipp]

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: EDEN (2014)


FÉLIX DE GIVRY IN EDEN

Drugs, women, and song: a subtle hymn to rave music that's a bit too much

Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature, technically her most ambitious yet, takes her pursuit of the personal a bit far in its beautiful but exhaustive and incident-and-character-rich but major-plot-poor decade-plus saga of her brother (and co-scripter) Sven's experience (he's called Paul here and played by Félix de Givry) as a pioneer DJ of the Paris rave scene, specializing in Garage music. Paul and his friends, including Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter (otherwise known as Daft Punk) are riding a dream of ecstasy (and for a while at least also the drug by that name) in their pursuit of the DJ life. Eventually as the Nineties meld into the 2000's and beyond, Paul, whose girlfriends are too numerous to keep track of (an early one is played by Greta Gerwig), begins to question if he wants to spend his life as a DJ. He also has developed a decade-long problem with cocaine, and encounters financial problems with unprofitable bands and clubs so his mother's checks and his trust fund administrators' generosities dry up. Along the way there are trips to New York and Chicago and visiting black singers who demand suites in five-star hotels and changes in musical tastes.

It's all in a gorgeous gray haze in the widescreen photography of Denis Lenoir: visually this film is a pleasure from first to last and right at the end there are some scenes of poetic beauty. Hansen-Løve is always a class act, and she and her brother show a full awareness that the world they are remembering was a feast (as well as an overdose) for the senses. Even the intertitles are pretty and tasteful. But she might have been too close to the story of her brother's experience to envision a fully independent film here that might have soared off on its own or had a simpler, more defined narrative shape. Recommended mostly for fans of discotheques and raves and the kind of music they offer.

The taste includes a certain restraint in the sound: we don't get our brains damaged or our ears blasted. Not that Hansen-Love's DJ world isn't complex and subtle in its awareness of contradicitons: as the Guardian's Paul McInnes says, "Glamour is twinned with mundanity, beauty with boorishness and friendship with selfishness, while artistic endeavour is undercut by self-indulgence." But I longed to see Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco again. For me, though Hansen-Løve’s 2007 first film All Is Forgiven is precocious and elegant, her 2011 memory of teen romance Goodbye First Love/Un amour de jeunesse is poetic and lovely, her 2009 Father of My Children/Le père de mes enfants remains her finest, richest film. Critics seem impressed by the complexity of Eden though, and it has gotten raves. It does not detract from the director's luster as among the most gifted of the young French directors.

Eden, 131 mins., debuted at Toronto, with big festival showings including San Sebastian, Busan, and London. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival (its US premiere). It opened in French cinemas 19 November 2014 to a fair critical reception (AlloCiné presds rating 3.1). Les Inrocks was very admiring, Cahiers disparaging.

Limited US theatrical release 19 June 2015.


STILL SHOWING FILM LOOK, FORMAT; THIS FACE IS HANSEN-LØVE IN FOREGROUND