dir. Mia Hansen-Love
High-quality entry in the rave movies category, this one a quasi-autobio of the director’s brother (& co-screenwriter) Sven Love’s “Cheers” night & DJ duo in Paris. Sven is stylized as “Paul,” whose rise the movie tracks from raving teen & budding garage DJ in 1992 thru to an inevitable descent into irrelevance & full-blown adult “regular life” confusion in late 2013. The same actor plays Paul for this 21 year period without visibly aging, and while the cursed Dorian Gray vibes this gives off are apropos, this’s probably more of a lucky function of the production budget than an intentional reference… the actual direct literary refs (Bolaño, Creely) are called out explicitly in scenes near the end.
Daft Punk are in the movie in a few scenes but it’s not “a Daft Punk movie” – they’re just Paul’s peers who happen to rise to cosmic-level stardom. And just as this isn’t Daft Punk fanfic, it’s not an Amadeus-style Salieri story where Paul is made into a cursed witness either. Fortunately it’s the opposite, Paul just loves them too. In one early scene Bangalter kinda shyly puts on Da Funk at a party at his not-home parents’ (incredibly nice) apartment. Paul hears it as he’s coming in and comments, “They finished their track…” and he listens and watches the room, and with a psyched smile creeping on, “It fucking rocks.” It’s great to see a movie that leans into what a proud & exulting feeling it is to be at an event where your peers are tearing the roof off… I can’t wait to feel this again!
From there on, it’s just stuff in this guy Paul’s life happening, grounded in his scene context, passionately for the first time, and then with increasing hollowness thru repetition, as habit, loneliness, and addiction gradually gather. Members of Paul’s crew leave the frame, for families in cheaper cities, workable middle class lives, global stardom, other schemes, death… but Paul keeps going, doing things the only way he knows. What will become of Paul?
Weirdly it kinda doesn’t matter. It’s a lived-in movie with an attention to accurate rendering, and I think anyone who has lived any amount of time in music scenes or spaces won’t be able to help but appreciate it on the basic level of its truth. Paul himself is at best an opaque guy who keeps shruggingly fucking up, at worst a worm with no inner life who’s lucky until not… the movie does basically nothing to invite empathy toward him or his position either way, giving the ending especially kind of a hovering “hhhhhhhuh” quality. And sure, there are a few corny parts, as there will be in all rave movies, especially near the beginning. But even so, I enjoyed it to the point of feeling the need to immediately rewatch, which I almost never do, and which I felt the movie sustained and rewarded. What can I say? I love this music, and I love gratuitous, endless shots of ecstatic dancing in clubs, and how joy and sadness are conjoined mysteriously in the celebration and memory of aging within a practice.
