An aspiring deejay enchanted by electronica in ‘Eden’

Starring Greta Gerwig, Brady Corbet and Claire Tran. Directed by Mia Hansen-Love.

Rated R for drug use, language and some sexuality/nudity. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 11 minutes.

Bottom line: A film that comes alive on the dance floor

By Michael Phillips

Chicago Tribune

Somewhere between “euphoria and melancholia”: That’s the music favored by the fictional young Parisian deejay in co-writer/director Mia Hansen-Love’s “Eden,” a fragrantly atmospheric portrait of a time, a place and a restless state of romantic yearning.

This isn’t the usual terrain of movies devoted to music. We meet skinny, shy, charismatic Paul, played by Felix de Givry, in 1992. He’s a teenager on the make, navigating his first illegal rave somewhere outside Paris. He and his affable friend Stan (Hugo Conzelmann) absorb all the new sounds like sponges, particularly the trancelike so-called Garage music coming out of New York.

Paul and Stan form a duo called Cheers, and their deejay skills point the way forward. They, and the film, roll through the years to the new century. “Eden” follows after these two as well as their friends and colleagues. Paul’s American girlfriend, played by Greta Gerwig, drops into his life for a time, and then out again. Inhabiting a parallel section of the same fertile Paris club scene, the members of Daft Punk become local heroes, and then international ones, while Paul and Stan enjoy reasonably steady work, taking them to New York early in the new century.

“Eden” is a sideways kind of story, its levels of fame and disappointment distinct but not melodramatic. Paul struggles with cocaine, debt and, in his 30s, the creeping sensation that the beat is going on without him, and it’s not really his beat anymore.

Hansen-Love wrote the script with her brother, Sven Hansen-Love, basing it on his deejay experiences. “Eden” empathizes with everyone on screen, from the moody graphic novelist Cyril (Roman Kolinka) to a freelance music journalist/scene-maker/riddle (Vincent Macaigne) who hosts late-night viewings of “Showgirls.” Hansen-Love’s camera captures the hours and days and years spent on the road through young adulthood. Photographed in gorgeous, supple widescreen by Denis Lenoir, “Eden” comes alive as cinema most vividly on the teeming dance floors of the venues Paul and Stan fill with their smooth, hypnotic brand of electronica, “like House but more Disco,” as Paul calls it years later.

Hansen-Love treats Paul’s story, unremarkable in many aspects, as a study in forward motion — on the turntable, on the dance floor, on motorcycles. By 2013, the time of the film’s final chapter, Paul has begun to change, and to process what he has been through. It’s not a euphoric ending, nor a melancholic one. It’s in the middle.