“It’s gentle and rousing, just what we like, between euphoria and melancholy;” Paul (Felix de Givry) gives this poetic description of his music in a radio interview halfway through Eden, but it can also describe Eden itself, Mia Hansen-Love’s film about the birth of garage music, or French house, an offshoot of house music named for its birthplace, the Paradise Garage in NYC. Too many music films are stuck on one volume, fixating on driving home a feeling of rebellion instead of portraying complex characters, but Hansen-Love delivers a loosely structured, complex, and surprisingly wistful look at twenty years in the life of Paul and his circle of friends.
Paul first encounters the music as a teenager still in school, going to underground shows in far-flung corners of Paris and becomes a DJ in the scene as it grows in mainstream popularity. He devotes himself to it entirely at the expense of the rest of his life, giving him a colorful youth but little to show for it after the genre’s popularity declines. Women float into and out of his life, he develops a drug problem and gradually overcomes it, he travels to America and meets his musical heroes – the film covers a lot of ground in its two-hour plus run time, but it’s all handled with an exquisitely light touch – nothing outside of music seems to matter much to Paul.
Watching the film, it’s easy to feel as the characters do, that no matter what problems or privations occur in real life, there’s always a faint thump of bass in the background, beckoning you to the dance floor. In Eden, the dance floor serves as a kind of dreamspace, or a hermetic paradise as the title suggests, where outside concerns have no purchase. The film repeatedly shows a crucial transition – the characters walking from cold grey skies outside into a club pulsating with energy, showing just how impoverished the outside world seems by comparison.
Hansen-Love co-wrote the film with her brother Sven, who himself was a DJ in this scene, and the film has a keen sense of both the joys and disappointments of this lifestyle, notably the intoxicating exciting of feeling on the verge of greatness and how that excitement can curdle into frustration as fashions change and you’re never able to take the next step. The film shows both the fleeting pleasures of beautiful scene-girls and being ushered into the best clubs (a running joke shows the Daft Punk guys without their masks not being recognized by bouncers) and the more substantial pleasures that fuel their artistic drive, giving the perfect beat to a vocal track, feeling your music move like a current through an appreciative crowd.
Paul seems to hope in his youth that the music can deliver him and his friends from the banal realities of life, and while it fails at that, it does sustain them for years, giving them a refuge to gather in. In Eden, as in life, happiness is fleeting, only really understood in retrospect. Eden expressively evokes the spirit of garage music, but doesn’t yoke it to a conventional narrative, instead poignantly showing years of man’s life slip through his fingers unnoticed as he chases his elusive dreams.
