Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.There are few filmmakers working today with the ability to both drill deep into primal emotions and maintain an artful perspective on their wracking turmoil; France's Mia Hansen-Løve is one of them. In Goodbye, First Love, her ode to the foolish obstinacy of young love, writer/director Hansen-Løve shows -- in bright colors and dark, gusting squalls -- what it is like to be swept away by overwhelming, and often unrealistic, feelings. Certainly, her teenagers and young adults here flirt not just with each other but with extreme ridiculousness. But it's a ridiculousness that's universally understood.
Lola Créton plays Camille, a teenager adrift in life like most any others. Then she meets Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), and the two embark on one of those unstoppable and unreasonable romances that brighten and mar so many adolescences. No matter how much Camille's mother cautions her against throwing so headlong into anything, she plunges on ahead, pledging her life to little more than being with Sullivan. For his part, Sullivan is harder to read. He's not precisely uncaring, but his relationship with Camille certainly seems to be less of a necessity for his life than it is for her. This becomes patently clear when Sullivan, who is slightly older, announces with finality that he is heading off to South America with a couple of friends. Camille, of course, asks to come with. Nothing doing.
So off Sullivan goes on his gap-year excursion. His letters back to Camille are treated like rare treasure, leading her to stick pins in a map showing his progress. But as the inevitable happens (fewer letters, the unraveling of his interest), Camille dives into a profound depression. Seeing the careful manner in which Hansen-Løve treats Camille's deep blue funk is a reminder of just how casually most romances handle this kind of thing. So often the jilting of an ex-lover is treated on screen as a brief aberration, even comical -- something better handled in a quick montage before the right one shows up. But in Goodbye, First Love, the possibility is actually presented that Camille may never in fact get over Sullivan. Hansen-Løve stacks the deck, of course, by having treated the couple's time together as some kind of paradisical dream (the color-drenched cinematography by Stéphane Fontane of A Prophet certainly helps). But Camille's mother expresses the beliefs of many audience members ultimately when she expresses disbelief that her daughter is throwing herself down the drain for a guy who seems ... okay, but really pretty much a jerk. It's that central contradiction of a generally well put-together girl deciding her life isn't worth living because her idiot boyfriend jets off to South America which gives the film (for all its lavish Gallic romanticism) its real-life grit. Hansen-Løve started out as an actress for Olivier Assayas, and so treats her performers here with great care. This was necessary for the film to work at all, since her screenplay is so impressionistic, and leaves so many gaps open for her leads to dance in and out of each other's space, sparring and tilting with wants and needs. However, there are times when it would have been helpful for the filmmaker to push her performers. Créton and Urzendowsky are both possessed of a kind of sun-dappled beauty that's perfectly made for romping about in wide-open fields (they do a lot of that). Also, their scenes with each other are knit together with a quietly fierce romanticism. But left on their own, and interacting with some of the other performers, the two have a tendency to fall flat. This is particularly evident in Créton's scenes with Magne-Håvard Brekke (playing a substantially older man whom Camille starts a relationship with later in the film), a much more seasoned performer who never appears to be acting in the way that Créton strives for.The unseasoned quality of these lead performances hamper the film, no matter how much finely-wrought and realistic passion Hansen-Løve can bring to the screen. She did much better in her last film, the understated small masterpiece Father of My Children, which handled grief with as much rending emotion as she does young love here, only with a tighter cadre of seasoned actors. Still, Goodbye, First Love is a beautiful, painful, baffling romance that never pretends to fully understand the passions at work in its raptorous images, and is all the better for it.
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