Goodbye First Love

There are times when I long for a great new film from France. Gone it seems are the days of Goretta, Chabrol, Truffaut, Malle and Bresson. Sometimes Techine rises to it, but only just. I was reminded a few days ago of what we are missing when I caught up with Mia Hansen-Love's "Goodbye First Love", a film that conveys the ecstasy and pangs of adolescent passion with a delicacy that the French so often manage to achieve with such effortless ease. In short, this could not have come from any other country. I watched the first third which follows the intense relationship of eighteen year old Sullivan and the younger Camille with something of the excitement of rediscovery. Hansen-Love's direction has a fluency and pace that perfectly match the breakneck quality of an affair teetering on the edge of uncertain fulfilment. When Sullivan departs with his mates on a South American backpacking trip Camille is distraught. Her slow recovery and recognition of a different type of love in her relationship with her mature architecture teacher, Lorenz, form the central part of the film. Unfortunately with the absence of a frenetic passion something of the vitality of the first third is lessened and the film becomes an altogether more mundane affair that even Sullivan's return several months later cannot quite rescue from the occasional yawn. What I imagined from the beginning might prove to be a re-run into "La Dentelliere" country ends up as something far less substantial in quality. Today's French cinema, although often still quite distinctive in style, sadly lacks a director of the calibre of those men from the past.

It's Paris 1999. Camille is 15 and Sullivan is 19 and they're in love. He's dropping out of school to go off to South America without her. After awhile, he stops writing to her and she falls into a suicidal depression. Years later, she's in love with her professor Lorenz. She has an intense relationship with him and then Sullivan returns into her life.

This is a lot of young love without limits. This is a very french movie. The young leads play their part like any random young lovers. This is semi-realism. I don't particularly like the guy. The fact is that he leaves her behind which puts into question how much he truly loves her. He's callous to her feelings and she's an overwrought young girl. Their original romance is not that dramatic since the movie is just waiting for them to break up. I'm just not particularly in love with their love and it's a passable romance.

(57%) If you close your eyes and imagine a modestly budgeted French film centred around the love and loss of Parisian girl, then this is almost certainly what you'd have in mind. In a very similar form to that of 2013's Blue is the warmest colour, this takes the more realistic route to express itself. So expect lots of scenes in which hardly anything happens, a purposefully plodding pace, and characters that live and breathe more in reality of everyday life rather than the pages of a piece of fiction. The performances are subdued, and the script is penned back keeping everything in the realms of normality which does have its engrossing elements, but it also could make this an unbearable watch for some. After Boyhood went above and beyond to have its lead actor at the same age as the character, while this on the other hand has the issue of Lola Creton looking a bit too old to be 15 at the start of the film, and a bit too young looking to be high-rising architect by the second half. Boyhood really has spoilt us. The relationship at the heart of the film is undoubtedly idyllic, sometimes a little too idyllic, but unlike the better Blue is the warmest colour this isn't as painful to watch when things start to go rough. Fans of realistic romantic drama should give this a look, but those who like explosions and fistfights need not apply.

Louis Garrel recently made his first feature film as director, Le Petit Tailleur, in an interview afterwards he admitted that his film was of a Paris that did not exist anymore, where the young went to the theatre to see Kleist. His film, as this one, contains a nostalgia for the New Wave. This is tacitly admitted in Goodbye First Love when Sullivan mentions that he went to a party in the suburbs where kids went to have sex and take drugs, a piece of shrapnel that doesn't fit in the jigsaw of this movie. The young of the developed world live with their eyes burnt out.

Goodbye First Love tells the story of Camille, in love with Sullivan, and how she copes with losing that love and moving on with her life. There's something pristine about the way that young animals love and lust together, narcotic and somewhat illusory, but on the threshold of paradise; and actually the most astonishing part of the film practically occurs in an Eden. One its successes is the casting of two actors who have an obvious sexual compatibility, which lends credibility to the treatment.

Mature love comes, but lies in the cradle of shared creativity and mutual respect, which should represent a superannuation of first love; but flesh is not just. For Camille, riding on the pannier rack of Sullivan's bicycle and grasping his body will always be the seed of her crystal.

Goodbye First Love, by the way, is an incredible aesthetic treat (my favourite part may well have been when the two rake over the ashes of their love, lying together likes ravens in a shattered tower, all a creation of capturing colour carefully). I felt privileged to have watched it, to have been let inside what's a meagerly-camouflaged auto-biography from Mia Hansen-Løve. I may well love and be loved back one day, but it won't be the Hamelin song that Mia has let me see, and I'm grateful to her for this facsimile.

One of the first things you notice in Mia Love-Hansen's film, 'Goodbye First Love', is that the supposedly fifteen year old protagonist looks much older; it turns out, there's a reason for this, which is that the drama is going to follow her over several years, so the age of the actress was necessarily a compromise. In fact, the film is conceptually not dissimilar (though heterosexual, and less generally ambitious) from 'Blue is the Warmest Colour': a sensitive and well-drawn story about a talented, attractive young woman whose life is overshadowed by the memory of an intense early relationship. As in real life, when someone is pointlessly in love with someone who does not desire them, you partly want to scream "get over it!", especially when they have obvious advantages they could be exploiting; but humans aren't that simple, although the ending is a touch underwhelming, the story is nicely observed. And if you generally like emotional films about beautiful young Parisiennes, you'll like this one too.