Hansen-Løve: Eden (2014)

An elegy for the last days of neo-disco, Mia Hansen-Love’s latest film was based largely on the life and career of her brother, Sven Hansen-Love, a prominent DJ in the 90s and early 00s. Detailing the rise and fall of the French ‘Touch’ music scene, it spans some twenty years, opening in 1992, and moving forwards until we finally arrive at 2013. Although there’s a nominal main character, in the form of Paul (Felix de Givry), a cipher for Sven, there’s not really much narrative or characterisation to speak of – just a loose collective of DJs, dancers and hangers-on who spend all of their life preparing for the dancefloor, dithering, doodling and wiling the time away from one nightclub to the next. As a result, although a great deal of it is shot during the day, it never really feels as if it leaves the dancefloor, as least not during the 90s, as waking life is absorbed into those few mystical notes that can set a crowd alive, perpetually drifting into the atmospheric, yearning chord progressions that, for Paul at least, defines Touch’s indebtedness to 70s disco and soul, its ability to tread the finest of lines between melancholia and euphoria. With dance music playing somewhere in the background – or foreground – of every scene, then, the film instead taps into the archetypal, utopian stories that the most beautiful dance tracks always seem to tell: stories of unexpected love and new mornings, unexpected connections and collective revelations, and, of course, stories bearing witness to electronic dance music as a medium in itself, songs of rapturous electro-collectivity. For all that these daytime reveries are evocative, though, the most atmospheric scenes take place on the dancefloor, as Hansen-Love went to some pains to gain rights to a soundtrack that would allow her to set whole scenes to some of the most iconic and beautiful extended mixes of the era – there is a sublime encounter set against the entirety of Frankie Knuckle’s “Whistle Song” – perpetually poising her long tracking shots and momentary communions on the fringes of the dancefloor, the zone where you feel most torn between acting and letting the music act upon you. Among other things, that’s the perfect zone to evoke music that only felt timely because of how beautifully it captured the passing of time, music that offered a respite from time only to plunge you back into a world in which time appeared to have moved even faster in your absence. In that sense, as the film tells it, Touch itself already contained its own decline, the decline that takes up the second part of the film, which drifts from the early 00s to the early 10s, and is even more poignant for the fact that it is set against the rise of Daft Punk, who form a kind of counterpoint to Paul as figures who started off in Touch but only endured by moving beyond it, albeit in the same elegiac direction as the film, if the curation of excerpts from Random Access Memories is anything to go by. Like Boyhood, then, but in a totally different way, it’s a film that manages to sidestep something a lot of films struggle with – how to frame the 00s as the past, or as continuous with a more remote past - if only by tapping into how one of the greatest 90s public spheres contained and predicted its own dissolution. Watching it is like feeling the 90s wash up on the shores of the mid to late 00s, as Paul’s dancefloors decay into so many lawn parties and cruise gigs, light years away from the mysterious, foggy, breathless rave field that opens the film, the second summer of love that sets everything in motion. If Touch music was already an elegy for itself, for its own fragile communities, then the film’s hindsight allows it to occupy the Touch dancefloor more fully, completely and permanently than anyone could have at the time, to turn it into a home – but of course that’s also what destroys it, the paradox at the heart of his heart-wrenching film.