Reseñas de la crítica

Despite the soap-opera potential of some of her material, Hansen-Løve roots these moments within the everyday, so that the emotion is hitched to a stream of non-dramatic but vital moments... By choosing to focus on what happens around the dramatic moment... she offers something that feels very much like life: things happen, we think we might break, we make a small gesture toward change and, eventually, the intensity passes – even as the echo of the past resonates through each new action.

Rich emotions are made manifest through minor details, and where Hansen-Løve's intricate and intuitive construction mode might evade conspicuous payoffs, it's the things that are not happening and the people who are not there that are often the most important.

Mia Hansen-Løve's Eden is about many things, any one of them a surprising, esoteric and rather brave subject for a film. Specifically, it's about the developments in rave culture from the early 1990s to the present. It's about lives tumbling along as the years drift by, never conforming to the plot you're expecting to kick in. It's about the thrill of being a DJ: the moment when you try out a new cut, a roomful of sweaty people writhing below you, and watch the beat being transmitted into dance.

For all that [Eden and Somewhere] share an astute attention to surface, Hansen-Løve's film beds down deeper in its milieu than Coppola's did. The result is a glorious celebration of the 90s dance scene which, like Hansen-Løve's breakthrough feature Father of My Children, asks poignant questions about the struggle involved in doing what we love.

Eden may feel like an epic, but only for its density of detail. Hansen-Løve plunges the viewer into Paul's world, rarely providing any background information about the music he plays or the people he meets—call it an epic made from the inside out.

The drifty, ethereal tone of Eden slowly envelops you, and it is one reason why the film, as understated as it is, remains so hard to shake. Hansen-Løve captures both the appeal and the curse of this subculture, the lotus-eater-like wasting away that comes with a life spent pursuing pleasure.

The second half has the same exact pacing as the first, but because a fall is supposed to be so much faster than a rise, this one feels torturously slower. The symmetry of the film becomes predictable, as it substitutes for the peaks of euphoria a series of flatly significant "after" shots that mirror the ones "before.

Eden is long, but Hansen-Love's style is so observant and specific that it is always a compelling watch and ends up being sneakily profound. It also features one of the best soundtracks in recent memory, a history lesson of club music. The film is quite personal, despite its slow and insistent historical sweep.

Even if you don't care for, or know much about, Nineties house music, the Hansen-Løves' collaboration evokes a sense of musical euphoria that I defy you to remain unmoved by—not least in the end credits sequence in which, long after the idyll has crumbled, we flash back to Paul and Louise in their childlike prime dancing to C. Dock's exuberant "Happy Song.

Eden is [Hansen-Løve's] most ambitious attempt to date at grasping what remains and what doesn't, and if the movie lacks a consistent through-line, it's because its chief goal is to evoke the way snippets of the past stick in the perpetual present tense of memory.

Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie's evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.

It's easier to tell the story of a smashing success or an utter failure, because there's drama inherent to either scenario, but what Hansen-Løve accomplishes with Eden is trickier, a feeling of being adrift in a scene where people are already invited to lose themselves to dance. What awaits on the other side? There are built-in frustrations to Eden that are difficult to shake off, but worth the effort.