There's something about Mia Hansen-Love's films that just don't work and don't connect for me. Her last film, The Father of My Children, never really came together and seemed like a good movie with a bad script and an unpolished concept. It's clear that Hansen-Love is a talented director (although I can't say yet that she's more than just merely "talented"), but I would say that she's a mediocre screenwriter and that her films suffer from garbagey melodrama that connects more to banal ideas of "romance" than to any real-world in which her stories take place.
Such is the problem with her new film, Goodbye First Love. It's the story of a high school girl, Camille (played by the fetching Lola Créton), who has a deep love for her teen boyfriend, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He's a few years older than she is and when he forgoes college for a shapeless trip to South America (the French love Ché!), the two lose touch. She takes this very hard and tries to kill herself (natch) and then comes out of the hospital without the lust for life she previously had.
She then goes to architecture school and begins to work for her professor, Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she also starts to sleep with, date and move in with. He's an older Norwegian man with an ex-wife and kid in Berlin who loves Camille's sensibility and reserve. Meanwhile, she struggles with her never-ending love for Sullivan and the constant wanting what she can't have.
I guess this isn't really the kind of movie I would ever relate to. I don't go in for sentimentality much and never really understand stories like this. For me, the concept of "first loves" is trite in the deepest possible way, and something that is more forced on us by gossip magazines and "girl culture" than by anything particularly psychological or human. What the hell is so special about Sullivan for Camille? He seems like a typically nice, distant and youthful boyfriend and their connection is much more suggested (by the fact that she can't ever get over him) than shown to us. When she ends up with Lorenz (as gross and cliche as it is to fuck your professor... seriously), it's maddening that she can't just be happy with him, but longs for Sullivan.
Herein lies an interesting dilemma for me. If film viewing is really an experience of identification and alignment with certain characters, it's impossible for me to connect to this film because I'm supposed to identify with Camille, but I can't because I think she's a fastidious moron. Meanwhile, I understand that many people (most people) would totally align with her because of how they're wired emotionally.
This leads to a bigger problem about the film, buried in the script, which is that Hansen-Love really doesn't do much to link us to Camille other than giving the briefest of outlines of her character. We only see the biggest moving parts of her persona, namely that she's 17 at some point and madly in love with a boy. This shorthand functions as the only information we get about her. For many this is enough to totally understand everything she feels at all moments. For others, like me, this seems under-written and under-developed.
Hansen-Love is truly a good director and is able to show a pretty movie with a nice use of technical factors. She is, however tripped up by her reliance on middlebrow scripts that don't show her skills as well as possible. I hope she continues to grow and make better films in the future.
Stars: 2 of 4
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