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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Review: Goodbye First Love

Note: This review was originally published as a part of our TIFF 2011 coverage. I’m re-running to now in conjunction with the film’s opening this weekend. You should go see it.


With her latest film, Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve handles her subject matter of adolescent love in a way that’s remarkably free of pretense and condescension, even as her youthful characters occasionally make choices that make you want to throttle them. The story is pretty simple: 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) and 18-year-old Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) are in love. Madly, desperately, in love, with an exuberance declared in the italics with which adolescents abundantly litter their emotional lives.

But Sullivan is departing for a 10-month expedition with friends to South America, leaving Camille to wonder helplessly, hopelessly, how he can say he loves her more than he can bear, and yet still bear to be parted from her. He is by turns sympathetic to her sorrow, and angry at her for making him feel guilty for leaving. And so it goes, with first loves and second loves and even third and fourth and fifth loves. The first real love, though, the first real goodbye, cuts deeper, stays with us longer, and even, if we let it, defines the pattern of our future loves and losses.

Hansen-Løve captures ever nuance, every aspect of Camille’s agony as if she’s studying some remnant from her own past under the microscope of a camera lens (the story, seeking to dissect and understand the way a heart loves and won’t let go.

You remember, surely, what it was like to be in love for the first time: First kiss. First sex. The first time you felt that you truly could not live without someone who wasn’t one of your parents. The desperate, clingy partings and the equally desperate, clingy reunions. The agony of waiting for the phone to ring, to hear that voice that’s become your everything on the other end of the line. The emptiness, the bleakness of your life and the enormity of your endless, barren future, stretching out before you into infinity, once it’s over. And the absolute certainty that no one, ever — save perhaps Romeo and Juliet, had they been real — has ever felt the way that you do.

In a 2010 Filmmaker Magazine interview for Father of My Children, Hansen-Løve said, “The more precise you are, the more universal you can be. When films are about a general thing, to me they will never say something true.”

In introducing Goodbye First Love at the film’s public screening at TIFF, she said something very similar. And it’s this idea of preciseness, a devotion to creating and exploring very specific characters through whom she can examine bigger ideas — the commitment to art that drives the artist, the soul-deep commitment to love that drives the heart — that seems to compel Hansen-Løve as a director.

On the other hand, she does not pander to an audience that lacks the patience to allow a story to unravel of its own accord; Camille’s growth and progression through the murky darkness of the soul into which she descends after Sullivan leaves unfolds with an agonizing, deliberate pace that evokes for the audience the full weight of the time it takes her to begin to heal.

In a Hollywood film about adolescent love, Camille would have gotten depressed, been allowed to mope about for about two minutes worth of montage set to some mooning pop ballad, then been promptly rescued by a pack of girlfriends descending upon her with gallons of chocolate ice cream, followed by a nice, soul-searching shopping spree at the mall, wherein her gaze would fall upon an even better boy than the one she just lost, and their eyes would meet across a crowded food court, and all would be well.

But not for Hansen-Løve the trite or the mundane. Camille immerses herself in her grief completely, isolates herself emotionally from everyone around her, goes through the barest motions of life while not really living at all — not for days or weeks, but for years. Then she emerges back into life slowly, one slow hand reaching up from the depths of despair at a time, with all the caution of a person who’s been locked in a dark room for years emerging, painfully, half-blinded, back out into daylight.

Hansen-Løve’s films are meticulously, precisely paced; there are no broad strokes or caricature to be found in her work, only careful studies of these particular characters and their particular lives. Where Sarah Polley — another smart female director busy making films from a distinctly feminine perspective — seems most interested in exploring the edges of relationships, Hansen-Løve focuses more on understanding what lies within them. It’s material that she mines deeplyl, with the innate sense of honesty that feels derived and nurtured, at least in part, by her own life experiences with the subjects she chooses to explore. And as with her previous work, Goodbye First Love is a beautifully wrought, delicately and precisely structured piece of storytelling that pierces the universal heart.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon