Goodbye First Love
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
Written by Mia Hansen-Løve
Written by Mia Hansen-Løve
with Lola Créton, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Magne Hårvard Brekke
2011
2011
The problem with first love is that to anyone not actually involved it’s totally insufferable. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve clearly wants to express some universal truths and touch the hearts of all with this maudlin tale of teenage love and its trace in adult life, but her follow up to Father of My Children is all carefully generated portentousness without the substance to back it up.
The film opens in the summer of 1999. Camille (Lola Créton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) are enjoying their time together before he leaves on a gap year to South America. They go on holiday to the countryside, swim, hike and make love. After he is gone he keeps in touch via love letters, with her tracking his journey through pins in a map, but their frequency steadily decreases until she is forced to contemplate continuing her life without him. Although not before the most half-assed suicide attempt ever. We move to her studying at university, in a silly architecture school sequence that’s meant to show her attempting to cope with her loss, but merely explains why buildings in Paris got a bit stupid. She starts a relationship with her tutor (Magne Hårvard Brekke), and appears to be moving on into a stable adult life. The reappearance of Sullivan confuses things once again, however, and she must overcome the conflict between her past and present loves.
Anyone making a romantic drama needs to be certain about at least one of two things: either they’re approaching from an angle that hasn’t really been done before, or the romantic leads are strong enough to carry the entire film. I don’t imagine I need to point out that teenage love has been covered pretty heavily in the past, and the pseudo-philosophy and achingly meaningful one-liners that pass for dialogue here offer absolutely nothing new. As for the two leads, they both have three facial expressions: ‘smile’, ‘cry’, and, the most common one by quite a margin, ‘neutral’. The script and the performances completely fail to make Sullivan or Camille remotely likable, so you’re left struggling to give a shit about these two intensely self-absorbed children and their wholly personal problems. Whether you want to call the performances bland or naturalistic, it doesn’t matter; the point is that their lack of energy doesn’t gel with the pretensions of the script.
To be fair to Hansen-Løve, she doesn’t seem to take her characters’ woes at face value, either. While she never convinces you that Camille needs to do anything other than get a grip, the story is still essentially about her growing out of childhood, and all the irrationality and immaturity that implies. A couple of times, at key moments of grief, she is gently told by her parents, “OK…you need to be getting over this now”, a position far easier to sympathise with than almost anything else in the film. Unfortunately, this recognition of the problems in identifying with Camille just means that the performances and general dialogue constitute an even larger misstep. If their situation isn’t to be taken seriously, then we have to care about the characters enough to stick with them and watch them overcome their deficiencies. In this case you're waiting for them to pull themselves together, with fraying patience.
I know I’m being obtuse about the relative unimportance of Camille’s grief, but I do think the script goes beyond failing to convince or endear the protagonists, and actually overstretches itself with the perspective it takes. I almost laughed in disbelief during the second act when it became apparent that it was four years later, and she was still concealing her grief within a diary. If the audience isn’t emotionally convinced on something that basic, then how are we supposed to care about what’s happening? There’s a hint that Camille and Sullivan may have been childhood friends before falling in love, which admittedly would give a lot more weight to their relationship. The starting point of their time together is left ambiguous, but this is an example of subtlety actually damaging a detail that would help you engage with the story. In any case, the clue appears after it’s been more like seven years since their initial break-up, so is a case of too little too late really.
Tom
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