Few trailers this year have provoked as visceral a reaction as the one for Zac Efron’s We Are Your Friends. Showcasing him as a superstar DJ, its trailer united anyone who had so much as owned a Ministry of Sound compilation in mutual derision. The only question being, which was the most laughable element. The self-satisfied, Trainspotting-liKe voiceover? The sequence in which Efron makes the model from the Blurred Lines video’s heart pump infra-red with his mastery of BPM? Or the suggestion that it might be a raging bro fantasy to file alongside the Entourage movie?
Audiences will have to wait until the end of the month to find out if such mockery is justified, but if it is, it won’t be the first time dance music has been done a disservice on film. Cinema has tended to engage with clubbing by using all the exaggerated gestures of a drunken uncle. Think of all those over-sexed but weirdly sexless Hollywood nightclub scenes or, by contrast, lairy British films, such as Human Traffic and It’s All Gone Pete Tong, intent on proving their chemical credentials by bulldozing the viewer with manic editing and stylistic tics.
Which is where Eden, from French director Mia Hansen Love, comes in. Tracing the rise and fall of a French house DJ, Paul, over 21 years, it’s the dance music drama that dance music fans have been waiting for. Mia based the film, and Paul, on the experiences of her brother Sven. A key player in the birth of the Gallic disco-house hybrid known as French Touch, alongside its famous progenitors Daft Punk, he was part of a DJ duo, Cheers, who ran renowned parties of the same name.
How does it stay on-beat where so many other depictions have stumbled? Because, rather than merely creating a soap opera with background beats, it lets the music do the talking.
That’s true of the first half especially, which shows the genesis of French Touch as Paul and his cohorts fall in love with the soulful vocal house music coming over from the US in the early ’90s.
At this stage, the film only pays lip service to a conventional narrative: priority is instead given to the musical sequences, as Paul experiences his awakening as DJ and clubgoer.
Says Sven: “(Paul) has one big thing in his life, he is driven by music… he falls in love deeply and passionately (with that); it’s difficult to find room for both.”
It will be easy for viewers of a certain age to get carried away in that emotion too, and not only thanks to the film’s frisson of authenticity – Paul is also part of a duo called Cheers, while Daft Punk pop up as supporting characters. Featuring a string of seminal early house classics, as well as rarer cuts, the soundtrack bursts with light.
“I felt something big and exciting,” as Sven remembers. “It was the first time pop music in France became so big and respected that the journalists really liked it. Before that French pop music was just crap and there was a kind of hedonism behind that music. It was just happy and positive and not worrying about the future.”
Mia concurs: an element that early American and French house had in common was “sincerity,” she says. Indeed, it would be difficult not to watch Eden and reflect on dance music’s lost innocence, in an era dominated by the banging bombast of the chart-house filed under the catch-all term EDM.
Central to the film’s authenticity are the many club scenes. They were a big consideration for Mia, who was determined to avoid straining for euphoric effect via slow-mo, hallucinatory fantasy sequences and the like.
“I wanted to make it more like real life. I didn’t want to embrace that vulgarity that is so common now, (that) MTV language, I wanted to get rid of that and find my own.”
Instead, putting confidence in the poetry of naturalism, she expertly captures the teeming vitality of the dancefloor, as the camera burrows into and gets lost within the hubbub of flailing limbs.
If the film subscribes to a convention, it’s that every party must end with a comedown. As the ’90s becomes the Noughties, we see how Paul, stubbornly refusing to adapt his musical style, is left behind by musical fashions as harder “electro” comes into play.
But Paul’s stasis is more than musical: the more those around him mature, the more he stays the same, his declining finances and mental health notwithstanding. Indeed, there is something desperately sad about the jarring way in which Paul hardly appears to age over the 21-year span of the film, despite his character’s avid commitment to booze and drugs. It contributes to the sense that, music aside, what we’re watching is a post-or-perhaps anti-Boyhood: a tale that is about the inertia that can follow the transformations of adolescence.
Sven says this is “more or less” his experience. “I didn’t get the feeling I was getting older, time stopped, and then one day I woke up and I was 37 and realised it seems like in eight years nothing has changed but the people around me and I was just doing the same.”
These days Sven, 41, is looking at life afresh, concentrating on writing – “I’m working on a novel” – while DJ-ing on the side to pay the bills, and Paul ends the film similarly revived.
However, Sven says that the one major chronological divergence from his story is that Paul’s rehabilitation occurs a few years later than his, in 2013. The reason for the timeline change? To accommodate Daft Punk’s comeback that year with the album Random Access Memories.
And it perfectly dovetails with the film’s conclusion when Paul is left stunned by his first hearing of the track Within; a piano ballad from an album of gentle pleasures that, like the film, feels testament to the mix of beauty and sadness that comes from mellowing with age.
The Independent
FIVE CLASSICS: FROM THE ‘EDEN’ SOUNDTRACK TO SPOTIFY Sueño Latino (Illusion First Mix)
Soundtracking the opening scene, in which Paul and his friends have a walk in the woods after an all-night rave, and kicking off the film on a high is this beautiful, ethereal 1992 mix of Sueño Latino’s self-titled ambient house track by Derrick May. Its synthesised flute notes and bird-like chirping are almost enough to render one airborne.
Sweet Harmony;
Finally;
Veridis Quo;
Four Daft Punk;
Gypsy Woman.