Gallic grooves
eden | Mia Hansen-Løve’s DJ drama sweeps across twenty years in the French club scene.
Human Traffic, 24 Hour Party People, Weekender, Sorted… good and bad, British cinema has seen plenty of movies that have tried to capture the dance music craze over the years. Less so the French – until now. Mia Hansen-Løve’s supercool Eden is an epic tale that follows a Parisian literature student named Paul (Félix de Givry) across two decades, as he establishes himself as a DJ and nightclub promoter.
Hansen-Løve wrote the screenplay with her brother Sven, who was a successful DJ in the 1990s. “He started in Paris when he was 16,” she explains to Agenda. “He discovered electronic music in England, just before raves were banned, in the late ’80s. He used to go there and take the ferry. Then they were banned and they came to Paris, partly because of that, and he fell in love with this particular brand of house music called garage.”
Seven years younger than her brother, Hansen-Løve used to hang out with her sibling when he spun records in the What’s Up Bar in Bastille. When they sat down to write the script, they plundered their memories of the scene – which exploded when French duo Daft Punk released ‘Da Funk’. “Sven knew them really well. They were really in the same group of friends. They all started together, worked together, went to the same parties. They are exactly the same age.”
Featuring in the film, one of the running gags sees Daft Punk’s Thomas and Guy-Man (played by Vincent Lacoste and Arnaud Azoulay) refused entry into clubs, with no-one recognising them. “It’s something they told us,” says Hansen-Løve. “It happened again recently to them, with the same guy refusing entry, at a different club… this time, the one who he did that to took it very seriously. He lost his sense of humour.”
Of course, what comes up must come down – and Hansen-Løve shows that excessive drug-taking can lead to depression and more. “The dark side of this story is probably the one that really made me want to make the film, to say something a little bit different about partying, and not just show the fun side of it. At some point, in this specific story, it becomes depressing and self-destructive and so I had to, if I was honest, talk about that too.”
When it came to shooting the club scenes, the atmosphere was as close to a dance night as possible. “One day, we were two hours over and everyone was exhausted, but the extras were so into the music – we played two more songs and everybody, including us, the actors, the technicians, were screaming and singing.” Did anyone indulge in any pharmaceutical pick-me-ups? “That I don’t know!” she smiles. “I’m not like a policeman.” JM
ETA | 24 JULY Eden opens next month.
‘I wanted to say something a little bit different about partying’