eden 2012 movie review

Eden (I) (2012)

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Jamie Chung (Eden) Beau Bridges (Bob Gault) Matt O'Leary (Vaughan) Eddie Martinez (Mario) Tantoo Cardinal (The Nurse) Tracey Fairaway (Abbie) Scott Mechlowicz (Jesse) Roman Roytberg (Ivan) John Farrage (Avni) Laura Kai Chen (Oma)

Megan Griffiths

A young Korean-American girl, abducted and forced into prostitution by domestic human traffickers, cooperates with her captors in a desperate ploy to survive.

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Review: ‘Eden’ Is A Gripping Sex Slavery Drama That Isn’t As Dour As It Sounds

Drew taylor.

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Often the problem when making an ‘issue’ movie, wherein you tackle some far-reaching social, systemic, or religious injustice, is that scope often becomes too burdensome, with the given topic often begging for thoughtful, intimate conversation and not the broad strokes that cinema offers. The best issue movies, things like Steven Soderbergh ‘s multi-layered “ Traffic ,” make the central concern seem both universal and incredibly personal, often setting aside crass moralization (the stuff “ Crash ” was mired in – hey, racism still exists, everybody!) for actual entertainment. “ Eden ,” the Narrative Feature winner at SXSW in 2012, similarly tackles the issue of sex slavery, but it does so in a way that never feels too clumsy or overarching. Instead, it’s a character study with thriller elements; it exposes you to a horrible underworld without ever beating you over the head with it.

The movie starts with us meeting Hyun Jae (former MTV personality Jamie Chung ), a Korean-American who works in her parents’ taxidermy shop in New Mexico. One night she goes out with a friend and meets a nice firefighter. She decides to ride home with him, but while stopped at a gas station she looks in his back seat and sees a number of uniforms for different professions. It’s a great “oh shit” moment, followed by a sequence that introduces Beau Bridges as Bob Gault, a U.S. marshal who is called to the scene of a dead body. The body is of a young girl, who has some kind of ankle bracelet. Gault asks the young policeman and the rancher who found the girl if they had told anyone else about this. They say no; so Gault shoots them both. These two sequences, back to back, are horrifying and incredibly suspenseful and they do a great job setting the tone for the movie. “Eden” may be a movie about the big issue of sex slavery, but it’s savvy enough to play like a thriller (more than once you’ll be reminded of 2011’s terrific, thematically similar Mexican film “ Miss Bala “).

Once Jae wakes up, she’s in a sex slave compound somewhere near Las Vegas. It’s a sterile warehouse, populated by young girls (mostly underage) in virginal cream-colored underwear, lorded over by Gault and his crack-smoking number two, Jesse ( Matt O’Leary , menacing and oddly funny). Girls are lined up in bunkers and checked for disease and illness and Jae is drugged and her braces are forcibly removed by someone we’re fairly sure doesn’t have an orthodontic license. This nuts-and-bolts approach to the world of sex slave trade eases you into the situation while most movies by this point would already have a metaphoric bright neon sign that said “ISN’T THIS AWFUL”? And it’s a testament to the strength of Chung’s performance, which justifiably earned her a Special Jury prize, that you go along with it completely. She’s wide-eyed and confused and so are we. She’s new to the situation, so we absorb the entire experience through her. If a lesser actress had filled the role, it would have been all weepy eyes and histrionics. Instead, she tries to approach the situation clinically, as if saying, “What have I gotten myself into and how the fuck am I going to get myself out?”

After going on a disastrous “date” with Jae (now dubbed Eden by her captors, after the trailer park where she lived in New Mexico), during which she bites the member off her client and attempts to escape through the neighborhood, we flash ahead a year. Eden is still in the facility, still being examined. But she’s determined now, steely, and is starting to understand the ins and outs of the company. Jesse likes to tell her that it’s a well-organized machine, but she makes note that during their last gig he was being scammed. So he takes her under his wing, forming an uneasy alliance, eventually pulling her out of the “field” and having her work an office job, answering calls from clients and occasionally going out with him to make sure the bookkeeping is straight. In a way this is even worse, because Eden is forced to watch, at a distance, as women she knows and has become friends with, are disposed of or even impregnated for the purposes of selling off their babies.

“Eden,” co-written (with Richard B. Phillips ) and directed by Megan Griffiths , is based on a true story (by Chong Kim ), and is nothing short of gripping. Maybe it’s more palpable because a cursory Google search can turn up details about the real-life incident, we know that it has a fairly happy ending (if you can call it that), but it mostly has to do with Griffiths’ staging of the events, which never veer into uncomfortable exploitation. Truthfully, there’s a shockingly small amount of sex and even less nudity. Maybe more of that stuff would have added texture, but it also could have also bordered on the tastelessly titillating. Instead, Griffiths sticks with the thriller approach, and it works well. There’s limited coverage of the Beau Bridges storyline, with just enough backstory given to the Jesse character (one of his comical/villainous threats: “I’m going to douse you in gasoline and light the fuse”). We’re with Eden almost the entire time and get to know the sex slave farm with the intimacy that she does. “Eden” is remarkably streamlined, too. It’s a period piece of sorts, taking place in the mid-1990s, so it’s free of technological clutter, instead letting us focus on Eden and her single goal – to get free.

Some might argue with the movie’s lack of context, but for an issue movie it’s remarkably small and personal. It’s telling the story of a single survivor and not the entire sex slave problem. And, again, it’s back to Chung – with her expressive eyes and her body language, which says so much, she’s able to fully inhabit the character. She even allows flashes of humor to shine through – while with a client she is forced to do a phony Asian accent that wouldn’t sound out of place on a ’70’s variety show. “I’m from China,” she purrs. Her client asks, “Oh really, what part of China?” He sounds genuinely interested and has probably traveled there on business. She shakes her head and says, “Just China.” It’s a moment of humor and humanity in a movie largely stripped of both. And it speaks to the power of Chung’s performance (and the movie itself). “Eden” may be unpleasant, but it’s not as grim as you’d imagine, and always compulsively watchable. If only all issue movies were this entertaining. [A-] 

This is a reprint of our review from the SXSW Film Festival 2012.

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Eden: movie review

• 3 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Time Out says

A quick warning to ladies who lock eyes with off-duty firefighters in New Mexico bars: Be careful, as the gent’s uniform and badge might be fake. Also, he may not want to pick you up so much as drive you to a secluded location, then sell you to a buddy who’ll tie you up in a car trunk and facilitate your new life as a sex slave. That’s what happens to Hyun-jae (Jamie Chung), a Korean-American 18-year-old who suddenly finds herself part of a low-rent harem run by a good ol’ boy sheriff (Beau Bridges, in mustache-twirling mode). Renamed Eden by her captors—an ironic moniker, given that she’s stuck in a living hell—this young woman is forced into a world of sickening servitude. Her only escape lies in winning the trust of the unreliable crackhead (Matt O’Leary) who oversees daily operations.

Based loosely—very loosely—on a real-life horror story, Megan Griffiths’s drama works best in its numbing first half, as the contrast between our heroine’s grotty existence and the banal landscape of Americana around it makes you feel as if you’re in a waking nightmare. Then the film decides that it really wants to be a thriller, and once bodies start piling up to a generic indie-twang score and plot turns head south of ludicrous, Eden ’s goodwill dissipates. What begins as gritty realism ends up as the usual made-for-cable melodramatics—an apple that’s always better left unbitten.

Follow David Fear on Twitter: @davidlfear

Cast and crew

• Director: Megan Griffiths
• Screenwriter: Megan Griffiths
• Jamie Chung
• Beau Bridges
• Scott Mechlowicz

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> Eden (2012) Film Review

Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson

Based on a real-lilfe case of human trafficking, Megan Griffiths (writing with Richard B Phillips and with help from the original victim Chong Kim) takes a measured approach to this story of kidnap and abuse. Hyun Jae (Jamie Chung) is a 19-year-old kid at the point of near-rebellion from her parents which means she sneaks off for a bit of underage drinking with her pal but probably gets home on time. Not on the night she meets an attractive fireman in a bar, though, because what looks as though it might hot date turns into a nightmare after she's bundled into the boot of a car. Hyun Jae - soon renamed Eden by her captors - is the latest acquisition to a 'stable' run for the most part by crooked lawman Bob (Beau Bridges), who farms out the youngsters for cash.

We follow Eden through her initiation and then catch up with her as she realises she's just about the oldest kid on the block and sets about working her wiles on Bob's crack-addicted lieutenant Vaughan (Matt O'Leary) in an attempt to ensure she stays useful.

Griffiths handles the exploitation with care, hinting at what goes on rather than rubbing our faces in it. Imagining what might be about to happen to a woman kneeling with her handcuffed hands over her head is every bit as disturbing as watching what happens. She also uses the "chaste" underwear of white vests and knickers which the girls wear when they're not out on a job in a bid to emphasise their youth. The problem here, however - and it is a big one - is that all the actresses are much older than the roles they are cast in. Chung, for example, is now 30 and must have been at least 28 when this film was shot. While Griffiths' avoidance of the salaciousness that can mar this sort of film is to be praised, the casting of these older actresses feels like a punch has been pulled. If we really did see 14 and 15-year-olds lined up in a corrider it would be much more affecting than the sight of twentysomethings.

Putting that aside, however, this is otherwise a well-handled film that shows the insidiousness of the business end of trafficking, putting the emphasis firmly on just how domestic this can be - with the women ordinary US citizens who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and the perpetrators not shadowy mafia bad guys but policemen or ex-Army types looking to make a quick buck.

Chung is gripping in the central role and O'Leary deserves credit as the twitchy Vaughan although his character, inevitably, is less well fleshed out. Sometimes Griffiths does threaten to skate just a little too much over the surface - the girls, for example, seem to cope remarkably well considering they are being filled with drugs half of the time. Nevertheless, her film is one of the more mainstream examinations of human trafficking - a fact borne out by is Audience Award at SXSW - that makes its point eloquently without resorting to shock tactics.

Director: Megan Griffiths

Writer: Megan Griffiths, Richard B Phillips

Starring: Jamie Chung, Matt O'Leary, Scott Mechlowicz, Beau Bridges, Tantoo Cardinal, Tracey Fairaway, Russell Hodgkinson,

Runtime: 93 minutes

Country: US

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• News & Features

Eden Review

By Rich Cline

Director-cowriter Megan Griffiths refuses to sensationalise the tabloid aspects of this harrowing true story about human trafficking within the USA. As she follows the central character into a nightmare of forced prostitution, the film could have easily exploited the sexual situations. Instead, she takes a matter-of-fact approach that's deeply unsettling. The filmmaking may sometimes feel a little simplistic, but it raises issues in ways we never expect.

The true story begins in 1994 New Mexico, where 18-year-old Hyun Jae (Chung) goes on a date with a seemingly nice guy (Mechlowicz) and is suddenly sold into black-market slavery. She's renamed Eden and forced to work as a prostitute alongside much younger girls. Living in a series of warehouses overseen by crooked cop Bob (Bridges), Eden continually tries to escape and is met with brutal punishment as a result. Finally, she decides that her only hope is to get close to their pimp Vaughan (O'Leary), a young veteran with a drug-addiction problem. But as she gets to know him, she realises that he's trapped as well.

The film explores much more complex aspects of the captive-captor relationship, as Eden becomes increasingly close to Vaughan, helping him with his work and even ratting out some of the other girls who break the rules. Of course, there's an event that snaps Eden back to attention, leading to the necessary confrontation. But all the way through, filmmaker Griffiths focuses on the psychological and emotional side of the story, leaving much of the actual violence and sexual abuse off-screen. Just a bit more detail, and a clearer sense of the chain of events, might have made the film's gut-punch much stronger.

On the other hand, without needing to portray the darker physical side of things, Chung is able to focus on Eden's internal struggles. Meanwhile, the brothel seems unusually clean, with mandated twice-daily showers and regular medical care, even as these women are victims of hideous degradation. This means that the "villains" are much more layered than we expect. So against our better judgment, we begin to like O'Leary's pimp right along with Eden. And that's the thing that chills us most of all.

Facts and Figures

Year : 2012

Genre : Dramas

Run time : 98 mins

In Theaters : Friday 19th July 2013

Distributed by : Phase 4 Films

Production compaines : Eden Productions

Contactmusic.com : 3.5 / 5

Rotten Tomatoes : 82% Fresh: 27 Rotten: 6

IMDB : 6.7 / 10

Cast & Crew

Director : Megan Griffiths

Producer : Jacob Mosler , Colin Harper Plank

Screenwriter : Megan Griffiths , Richard B. Phillips

Starring : Jamie Chung as Eden, Beau Bridges as Bob Gault, Matt O'Leary as Vaughan, Tantoo Cardinal as The Nurse, Naama Kates as Svetlana, Scott Mechlowicz as Jesse

Also starring : Matt O'Leary , Jacob Mosler

• Eden Movie Site
• Rotten Tomatoes

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Eden (2012)

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A young Korean-American girl, abducted and forced into prostitution by domestic human traffickers, joins forces with her captors in a desperate plea to survive.

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Eden (2012/I)

Distributor.

Phase 4 Films

Release Date

Mar 20, 2013

Release Notes

Official website.

• eden-the-film.com

After a night out with friends, Hyun Jae accepts a late night ride home from a young firefighter. What begins as a night of promise quickly turns into a nightmare when she is abducted and imprisoned in Vegas as a sex slave. Renamed "Eden", she learns she must build the trust of her captors and sacrifice everything in a desperate plea to survive.

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True Story Inspires Tale of Sex Trade; in a Twist, a U.S. Marshal Is the Bad Guy

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By Stephen Holden

• March 19, 2013

Enough films about human trafficking have been made in recent years that the outlines of “Eden” should be painfully familiar. But that familiarity doesn’t cushion this movie’s excruciating vision of under-age women conscripted into sexual slavery by a criminal enterprise from which there is seemingly no escape.

You may call me naïve, but it is deeply upsetting that “Eden” is set in the United States and that the organization’s boss, Bob Gault (Beau Bridges), is a law-and-order-preaching United States marshal. We imagine this kind of crime flourishing in the shadows of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But in the United States, with a backslapping good old boy running the operation? Could it be?

The movie , directed by Megan Griffiths, is loosely based on the true story of Chong Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to the United States as a toddler. As a teenager in the mid-1990s, she became a captive of the domestic sex trade. She eventually survived her ordeal and has become a crusader against human trafficking.

In the film she is a Korean-American teenager named Hyun Jae (Jamie Chung), who works in her parents’ New Mexico gift shop. She is picked up in a bar by a handsome, friendly young firefighter who offers her a ride home. Along the way, he makes a stop and exits the vehicle. Moments later she is kidnapped and drugged and has her identification and possessions confiscated.

Renamed Eden, she soon finds herself in a regiment of sex slaves, most of them immigrants, imprisoned under close guard in a converted storage facility. In a bizarre touch, each girl is given a tiny kitten to take care of.

The movie is frustratingly arbitrary in what it shows and what it leaves out. Although events are seen from Eden’s perspective, we are never given a clear picture of her daily routine. There is no nudity or explicit sex, although Eden’s clients — we see only two or three — graphically voice their demands.

Other sickening forms of brutalization are shown. The women are suspended from the ceiling and whipped. After an incident in which Eden viciously fights back a john and desperately tries to flee, she is handcuffed and thrown into a bathtub filled with ice cubes.

What human dimension there is concerns Eden’s ambiguous connection with Vaughan (Matt O’Leary), Gault’s bullied, drug-addicted assistant. He is a lost boy, and Eden solicits his trust by offering to help him in his various jobs. Before long they are de facto partners. He teaches her to drive his van, in which caged girls are ferried back and forth from the storage facility to a makeshift hospital and to bars where they are paraded before mostly white, middle-aged clients.

“Eden” leaves many details cloudy. We learn late in the film that the babies of the girls who become pregnant are sold. And it is suggested that by the age of 20, when a girl is considered to have outlived her commercial shelf life, she faces execution and burial in the desert. Shadowy international connections are referred to. At a certain point, the entire operation considers abruptly relocating to Dubai.

The movie is set in the kind of Southwestern outlaw territory found in the AMC series “Breaking Bad” and in “No Country for Old Men:” an arid, lawless no man’s land that looks as forbidding today as it did in the 19th century.

After watching “Eden,” you may worry that the cargo in any innocent-looking white van streaking down a highway may not be furniture and home appliances but a group of chained sex slaves being taken from one hell to another in a sadistic warlord’s fiendish underground network. That fantasy describes the residual chill the movie leaves behind. For the perpetrators in the film, human trafficking is no different from animal slaughter. It’s just business as usual.

“Eden” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has strong language, violence and sexual situations.

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2012 Directed by Megan Griffiths

Innocence isn't lost, it's stolen.

The true story of Chong Kim—abducted into the sex trade as a young teen—and the complicated moral choices she had to make in order to survive as her situation grew more desperate.

Jamie Chung Beau Bridges Matt O'Leary Tantoo Cardinal Naama Kates Scott Mechlowicz Russell Hodgkinson Tracey Fairaway Roman Roytberg Laura Kai Chen John Farrage Bhama Roget Demetrius Sager

Director Director

Megan Griffiths

Producers Producers

Jacob Mosler Trent Broin Colin Harper Plank

Writers Writers

Megan Griffiths Chong Kim Richard B. Phillips

Casting Casting

Emily Schweber

Cinematography Cinematography

Sean Porter

Production Design Production Design

Ben Blankenship

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Laurie Hicks

Stunts Stunts

Sherril Johnson

Composers Composers

Matthew Emerson Brown Joshua Morrison Jeramy Koepping

Costume Design Costume Design

Rebecca Luke

Centripetal Films Eden Productions

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

English Chinese Spanish

Releases by Date

20 sep 2012, 11 mar 2012, 06 feb 2013, 18 mar 2013, 13 nov 2013, releases by country.

• Theatrical 12
• Theatrical 16
• Premiere Athens Film Festival

Netherlands

• Theatrical R

98 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by matt lynch ★★ 1

nothing this horrific needs to be presented so conventionally and "tastefully". if the film is going to hurt her, it has to hurt us. otherwise it's tourism. it cuts away just because it's afraid we can't handle it. us not being able to handle it is ultimately what would protect this film from the charges of exploitation and prurience of which it's so terrified. personally i think it's a total cop out. as for Chung, she patiently rescues this movie bit by bit, keeping Eden's fear completely stamped down, in a role that's had most of the meat stripped away in favor of scoring bland points regarding her (and therefore our) "complicity".

the things that happen to the main character…

Review by adria ★★★★

If you have to see violent, graphic imagery in order to feel for these women and be horrified, you’re the problem, not the movie.  This is based on a real story and the victim of that story was the co writer.  The choices to show this story without the violent images of rape and gore could be a metaphor for how the issue often goes unseen, it could also to prevent from triggering its audience.  I felt deeply saddened and disgusted, horrified and ill throughout the entire movie.  It was beautifully shot and the acting was incredible.  one of my main complaints is an issue with pacing, the storytelling here is lacking in some aspects for sure.  Overall I respect this film and Chong Kim tremendously.  I recommend everyone watch this.

Review by mattmav45 ★★½ 1

This is a film in which the subject material is played far too shallow for my tastes.

A film about illegal sex trafficking would seem to provoke emotions in the hardest of souls but this is too conventional. It is simply way to mechanical and calculated in its approach. There is not one single aspect that really sticks out as it feels ultimately pretty bland.

This is not material that should necessarily be exploited, but I feel like they had to dig deeper here. The film never did a good job of portraying the ruthlessness and darkness of the sex trade. While this is subject matter in which the imagination can take hold, the film didn't really even get it…

Review by LaresPares ★★★½

Sehr gefühlvolles und überraschend stark gespieltes Quasi Biopic einer von einem Mädchenhändlerring entführten 19-jährigen. Eden bekommt zum Ende hin ein paar Pacing-Probleme, wenn es um den Ausbruch aus der Gefangenschaft geht und alles plötzlich sehr schnell geht, ist aber sonst eine positive Überraschung.

Verzichtet zudem zu 100% auf explizite Bilder von Vergewaltigungen und allen anderen bekannten und auch hier offensichtlichen Abartigkeiten - die Reviews gehen auseinander, ob dies respektvoll oder einfach inkonsequent oder sogar feige ist. Für mich ist ganz klar: Kein normal denkender Mensch braucht irgend eine Explizität, um zu verstehen was diese Mädchen durchmachen und mit ihnen mitzufühlen.

Review by Audrey ★★★

shook to my core by the harsh realities presented in this film, all acted so stunningly by jamie chung.

Review by Dottie ★★ 1

Gary Giggles went down the wrong path after leaving Spy Kids

Review by Sarah ★★★★

One of the better films about sex trafficking. This is largely because Eden  isnt about the supposed heroes who are valiant shooting sex traffickers and saving children. It isn’t even about the sniveling villains. It’s about the victims and through that it brings a harsh reality. It’s not evil brown people who perpetuate this abusive system but other white people. I especially appreciate how it showed the active complicity of police and the racial hierarchies among the trafficked. So much of the system is also based on fetishizing non-western, non-white women and girls. By focusing on these cultural issues, Eden  shows that the same conservatives who go on about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring are the actual supporters of this…

Review by Sam ★★

i played amazon prime roulette and this is what i got stuck with…..absolutely bonkers way to handle a certain subject matter

Review by bri ★★★★★ 1

SLAYYY YESSSS BITE HIS PENIS OFF

Review by BobbyBubbleBath ★★½

It’s bad enough they kidnapped and tortured these poor women, did they really need to give them cats as well? That’s a step too far.

Review by 𝖍𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖔𝖗 🥀

This film was such a dour experience. I can’t imagine ever seeing it again. I can’t rate this film. I just wish humanity wasn’t so needlessly cruel.

Review by Elizq ★★½

people like these make me sick to my stomach

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Eden review – the perfect mix of music and melancholia

Mia Hansen-Løve’s tremendously stylish film about a Paris DJ coolly shuns a traditional narrative to move in time with its own ambient beat

G etting loved up is a rare pleasure and purpose in the cinema, and it’s what Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden is all about. Her hero Paul is a Paris club DJ who likes music combining euphoria and melancholia; this wonderful, mysterious film has both, though Paul often remains cool and impassive, even at the height of his ephemeral success. His emotions are displaced outwards into the music. From the early 1990s to the late noughties, he maintains an eerily fresh Dorian Gray look. While being carried home apparently out of it, an elderly neighbour snaps something about “la jeunesse” – “the kids” – and Paul recovers sufficiently to mumble that he is 34. (This is also the director’s age.)

With elegant sidelong glances at Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut, Eden swims with the plotless aimlessness of being in your 20s, and shows how Paul’s youth and ambitions pass in a dream: unfocused, unarticulated and unrealised, concealed by the illusory eternal present of clubbing, with its compelling hedonism and heartbreaking economics. Hansen-Løve coolly refuses the traditional plot emphases of ambition, hubris and redemption, keeping the narrative arc subtly contained within her movie’s ambient sound. A movie about clubbing is difficult to pull off – though I have happy memories of Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic (1999) – and Hansen-Løve manages it with tremendous style, bringing in small English-speaking roles for Greta Gerwig and Brady Corbet, and a running gag about those French music legends Daft Punk being repeatedly refused entry to clubs. This is a worthy successor to Hansen-Løve’s previous films Goodbye First Love (2011) and Father of My Children (2009): it is absorbing and very moving.

Félix de Givry’s Paul is a serious young man who gets into the early-90s underground club scene while a student, notionally working on a literary thesis: De Givry has something of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s priestly severity, in his shirt and V-necked sweater. Conceiving an overwhelming passion for garage, he forms a DJ partnership with his friend Stan (Hugo Conzelmann), drolly calling themselves Cheers, and his friends include graphic artist Cyril (Roman Kolinka), fellow clubber Arnaud (Vincent Macaigne), American girlfriend Julia (Gerwig), and other girlfriends Louise (Pauline Etienne) and Yasmin (Golshifteh Farahani). Soon, Paul gets a radio slot, regular club nights and residencies, staging ambitious events in Paris and New York. The collective life of Paul and his équipe migrates from scene to scene, from episode to episode, with laidback insouciant sexiness, even when nothing overtly sexy is happening – or even when nothing of any sort at all is happening. There is even a New Wave cinephile touch in having the group argue about whether or not the awfulness of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is deliberate.

But where you might expect a narrative gradient towards wealth, cynicism and grey hair, Hansen-Løve keeps Paul looking weirdly the same, yet also shows that he isn’t getting any more materially successful, as if trapped in a student eternity. A cash inheritance from his father floated this precarious adventure in the first place, but he is living at home with his widowed mother, who is having to bankroll everything. This is Arsinée Khanjian, and in this French-speaking role, Khanjian is refreshingly without the mannerism of some of her other performances. The spectacle of a packed club – and the cult of the DJ presiding over it all – creates the impression of overwhelming success. But the guestlist could be outweighing paying customers, and cocaine is a gigantic invisible expense. Other people are getting rich in the club scene during this 15-year period, and Paul is helping them, without seeing how he is starting to drown in the rising waters of others’ prosperity.

In the first act, Paul is visited by a kind of augury: a cartoon bird that flies psychedelically over a dark woodland, an enigmatic indication of … what? It could be nothing other than his own whimsy or spaciness. But the memory of that bird is strangely affecting by the end: a sign that his dedication to music was a secular state of grace, especially as it is not accompanied by greed or vanity: only naivety. It was also an emblem of youth: so evanescent, taken so casually, so lightly. Paul’s character is avowedly based on the director’s brother, but Hansen-Løve has a superbly light touch; her film does not force on us its autobiography, or its historical or personal insights. Eden is haunting, delicate: it’s a vividly sensual movie about pleasure, which gives pleasure too.

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• Movie - Eden - 2012

Eden  (2012)  إيدن

• Release Date: 11 March 2012 (US) (more)
• Genre: Drama (more)

After being abducted and forced into prostitution by domestic human traffickers, the Korean-American girl Eden tries to escape to save herself from the dark fate awaiting her.

• Megan Griffiths (Director)
• Megan Griffiths (Writer)
• Chong Kim ()
• Jamie Chung
• Beau Bridges
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• Tracey Fairaway

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What becomes clear pretty early on in Mia Hansen-Love 's "Eden" is that despite the large roving ensemble of ravers and DJs and partiers, and despite the fact that there is a lead character, the dance-club "scene" is the real star of the film. "Eden" is an ode to French house-music (known as the "French touch"), and a portrait of the kids so inspired by DJ Larry Levan and the sound he developed at Paradise Garage that following his lead became not only a lifestyle-choice but a philosophy. The scene changes over time, starting out with underground raves in abandoned warehouses or old docked submarines, and morphing into parties at gigantic nightclubs with a velvet-rope policy at the door. "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, and it's co-written by Hansen-Love with her brother Sven, based on his experiences as a DJ in the French house scene. 

"Eden" focuses on one kid, Paul ( Félix de Givry ), a university student obsessed with "Garage" music, and blowing off his dissertation because of his party schedule. He wants to be a DJ, and hangs around the DJ-tables at raves, asking questions, bonding over music. The DJ is the rock-star, powerful and glamorous. Paul's mother does not understand what her son is doing with his life. But Paul is devoted to music, and knows the kind of sound he wants to create, a mixture of "euphoria and melancholia." He has a partner in this pursuit, and they create themselves as a DJ duo called "Cheers," modeled in part on their idols, Daft Punk (who appear as themselves throughout the movie in a running gag where they try to get into clubs and nobody recognizes them).  

If you remember the early-1990s rave scene, Hansen-Love's film will ring so true. Teenagers, through word of mouth, or cryptic messages placed in the back pages of fanzines, gathered in out-of-the-way places, often armed with secret passwords for entry, and got "lost in the music." Ecstasy rose as the drug of choice, bringing with it its famous warm-fuzzy feelings (as opposed to the more selfish high from cocaine in the '70s and '80s). You had to know where the party was. You sought it out. Over time, house music rose in influence, sweeping the world, and the DJs who started out spinning records at illegal raves in dilapidated abandoned buildings began to get better-paying gigs at high-class joints in places like St. Tropez. Hansen-Love is very interested in people, but she is more interested in the larger movement of their lives, and how time pushes them along and changes them (or doesn't).

Surrounding Paul is a large ensemble of good friends, and we get to know them almost by osmosis, typical of Hansen-Love's subtle approach. There's Arnaud ( Vincent Macaigne ), hilarious and bitter, haranguing his friends repeatedly about " Showgirls ," screaming that it is a masterpiece and why won't they get that? There's Louise ( Pauline Etienne ), a sweet and supportive party girl, who dates Paul for a couple of years. Their relationship is intimate and intense. Cyril ( Roman Kolinka ) is an artist, working on a comic book, creating posters for Paul's DJ career, and battling depression. "Living at night depresses me," he says. Other people come and go. They enter the scene, and they leave it. Throughout "Eden," Mia Hansen-Love features different long takes where she follows a character through a rave, or a club, or a dance-party, through the gyrating thrashing throngs, the neon and the darkness pulsing through the frame along with the music. The scenes repeat. Denis Lenoir's cinematography is beautiful, evoking the eternal nature of the dance-club scene and yet sensitive to its nuanced changes, how it moved from DIY to corporate. 

Hansen-Love's films (four features thus far) are "about" many things—first love, family life, suicide, drug addiction—but the plot is not paramount. " Goodbye First Love " told the story of a young girl's first romantic experience, and Hansen-Love observed from a distance. It's not a cold style, just uninterested in the common use of catharsis, melodrama or even plot. " The Father of My Children " was about a busy film producer with a loving family, who puts a bullet in his head when his business starts to implode. In that film, Hansen-Love stays with the family in the aftermath of the tragedy, watching how they adjust and deal with the financial and emotional chaos he left behind. She continues to watch and look when other filmmakers, interested only in the plot, turn away. Her films bring with them a feeling of the relentless and heavy push of time itself. How do we "get over" things? Well, it takes time. Time does not heal all wounds, but it does change our relationship to painful events. Paul experiences that in "Eden" when he meets up with an American ex-girlfriend (an awkward and sweet Greta Gerwig ) years later when he DJs a party at P.S. 1 in New York. There is a poignancy in their encounter, a sense of a road not taken, but the sharpness of the initial pain has lessened. Time has done its work, off-screen. This is a hard quality to capture on film, although we all know it from real-life, and Hansen-Love accomplishes it repeatedly.

She devotes herself, methodically, to what her characters do, refusing to zoom in, so to speak, on the highs/lows of emotion. Those highs/lows exist, but they are not lingered over, or fetishized. There's almost a George Eliot quality to her work. George Eliot's novels often give the impression of an omniscient narrator sitting on a cloud, staring down at the pain and anxiety of human life; that distance provides the perspective necessary to tell the story. Paul's journey in "Eden" features many elements, creating a tapestry of one man's life: the inappropriate women he dates, the financial debt he piles up, family problems, drug problems, good times with friends, sweet moments with women he loves. 

The acting in "Eden" is naturalistic and spontaneous. "Eden" takes place over 20 years, and, except for haircuts and facial hair, nobody visibly ages. Hansen-Love is interested in things other than being "realistic". ("Goodbye First Love" had the same disinterest in "aging" the actors). The group scenes with Paul and his friends are wonderful, thrusting us into their familiar dynamic, the jokes, the philosophical conversations, the way everyone speaks over everyone else. Like the dance-club "scene," this group feels real. Hansen-Love has a great eye for detail. Watch for the expression on the harassed waiter's face when someone in the group orders an "apple juice" at 4 in the morning. Or the hilarious section when Paul dates a woman only interested in him because he is a DJ "name," stringing him along in a sexless relationship for a couple of years, hoping she'll find someone better. That character only appears in two scenes (such is the sweep of time covered in "Eden"), but the script is so efficient, so specific, that we get the entire picture in a couple of snapshots.

In lieu of a traditional plot, Hansen-Love brings us not only a whole world, but an entire era. The length of "Eden" is admittedly taxing at times, but Hansen-Love's disinterest in traditional plotting, her disregard for the "norms" of story-telling is why it is unique, and why it is so relevant and fresh.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Eden (2015)

Rated R for drug use, language and some sexuality/nudity

131 minutes

Félix de Givry as Paul

Brady Corbet as Larry

Greta Gerwig as Julia

Arsinée Khanjian as La mère de Paul

Pauline Étienne as Louise

• Mia Hansen-Løve
• Sven Hansen-Løve

Cinematography

• Denis Lenoir

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