Archive | Film Matters

Time is more than a theme in the films of Mia Hansen-Løve. It is a hero, a driving force that calmly looks past the kerfuffle of everyday life. Coupled with cash, it’s both ruthless taskmaster and the prettiest of muses in “Father of My Children” (2009), about a revered independent film producer who commits suicide when his funding runs out. In “Goodbye First Love” (2011), it’s the therapist who releases a young heroine from her mortal coils. Now, in “Eden,” a tour de force that’s bound to give the French writer/director the U.S. recognition she’s long deserved, time is measured by personal evolution rather than the passage of hours and years. It is a hegemony of memory; a perpetual-motion, nostalgia-generating machine that wounds all heels, especially callow youths.

About the rise and fall of French techno DJ Paul (Félix de Givry), “Eden” spans two decades though it occupies each moment so fully that the transitions wash over us gently, at least at first. The film opens in the early 1990s, when Paul is a starry-eyed teen newly in love with garage music; he’s so taken by this subgenre of electronica that his ardor is infectious even if we don’t dig the beats. We wander through dance floors and secret raves, record-filled dorm rooms and radio studios as Paul amasses his posse: Stan (Hugo Conzelmann), with whom he forms a mildly successful DJ duo; Cyril (Roman Kolinka), a gloomy, brilliant visual artist; Louise (Pauline Etienne), a Betty Boop-eyed semi-siren who proves a surprisingly enduring on-again, off-again girlfriend; and Thomas (Vincent Lacoste) and Guy-Man (Arnaud Azoulay), who in 1992 start out as the DJ team Darlin’ but ripen into the world-famous Daft Punk. (Actors portray these real-life characters.) Continue Reading →

Humans, especially males, most closely resemble their primate ancestors during adolescence. Yet for all that Hollywood courts teen boys, few films have gone so far as to treat this demographic as if it were nature documentary fodder. Two June releases – “The Tribe,” a Ukrainian feature film about a gang of deaf students, and “The Wolfpack,” a documentary about six New York City home-schooled brothers – call that bluff, and their approaches are not as ethical as we would hope.

Truth be told, in “The Wolfpack,” being homeschooled is the least of the problems facing the Angulos, who live as semi-prisoners in a claustrophobically small public-housing apartment with their cultish parents and special-needs sister. Eldest Bhagavan, twins Govinda and Narayana, Mukunda (the “alpha” of the pack), and younger siblings Krsna and Jagadisa have been raised by Peruvian father Oscar and Midwestern hippie mother Susanne, who traveled the world as Hare Krishnas before running out of cash and landing in a Lower East Side housing project. Oscar – an alcoholic autodidact whose physical violence is hinted at (we see old video clips of him though he infrequently appears in director Crystal Moselle’s footage) – declares himself philosophically opposed to work and the rest of the world unsafe so he keeps the family under lock and key. For most of the brothers’ lives, they’ve only been allowed outside a few times a year (giving credence to the old saw that New Yorkers never get to know their neighbors), and their sole connection to the world is through Oscar’s DVD collection. Left to their own devices, they spend their days watching and re-creating films – typing out and memorizing scripts, crafting costumes and props out of cardboard and duct tape, barking in a Tarantino patois, and staging favorite shootouts while Oscar nods out in a back room and Susanne and sister Visnu smile bleakly. Continue Reading →