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N0 4 / 27 FEB – 1 MAR
28 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm | 1 Mar,GFT, 11am
Lost in Music Mia Hansen-Løve discusses her brilliant new film Eden, an intimate epic telling the history of the French Touch music scene through one DJ’s bloodshot eyes
M
ia Hansen-Løve is sitting legs folded, Buddhalike, on a straight back chair in a London hotel conference room. In her hand she’s unconsciously fiddling with a card of stickers covered in Disney princesses. She sees them catch my eye. “My daughter was playing in here before,” she explains. “I should put them away, really. People will think I’m weird.” She carries on
INTERVIEW: playing. One gets the impression the 34-year-old filmmaker doesn’t worry too much about what other people think of her. You can see this strength of character in her small but exquisite body of work. Her first three features (All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love) reveal a filmmaker with a distinct voice all her own; one that is concerned with organic rhythm and gentle ironies rather than grand dramatics or convoluted scenarios. “I think it’s probably both my strength and my weakness,” she suggests of her low-key style. “It always brings me problems when I try to finance the script because people tell me there’s not enough drama, there’s not enough plot, not enough violence.
Jamie Dunn
The thing is, my own emotion works this way – I can’t help but trust it.” Take her latest film, Eden, which charts the rise of French house music from the early 90s to the present day. A more conventional filmmaker might want to tell the story from the point-of-view of one of the scene’s superstars, say Daft Punk. That electronic duo do make an appearance as baby-faced house party wax-spinners, but Hansen-Løve’s focus instead is Paul, a contemporary of Daft Punk’s (he’s at the party where they premiere Da Funk), who didn’t quite make it. Hansen-Løve based the character on her own brother, Sven Hansen-Løve, who was a DJ on the French Touch scene and ended up left behind by the wave. continues…