Review No.70: Goodbye First Love

We'll be doing a bit of a world tour over the next couple of films kicking off with a brief sojourn in France with Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye First Love. The film tracks the story of  Lola Créton's Camille for the best part of a decade and in particular her relationship with the love of her life Sebastian Urzendowsky's Sullivan. The film begins when Camille is fifteen and Sullivan is a few years old she is completely besotted with him while he loves her but is more concerned by how many times he can have it away with her. The first half an hour or so of the film sees their relationship when it is all sex and weekends at his cabin before he quits college and goes off to South America with his buddies leaving her behind. After his letters stop coming she becomes depressed eventually tries to end her own life, suicide being the theme of Hansen-Løve's first film The Father of My Children, however she picks herself up evenutally deciding to study architecture. For years Camille still won't let men go near her until she falls for her professor and the two move in together however when Sullivan comes back into her life old feelings come to the surface.

Goodbye First Love reminds me the most of Like Crazy, one of the first films I watched for this blog, as it tracks a relationship between two young people over a number of years. In the case of Hansen-Løve's film though it is Camille who is hooked on the idea of a relationship that she has idealised rather than both members of the couple. I really enjoyed the start of the film where Camille and Sullivan's relationship is explored in its infancy we see a teenage girl obsessed with true love and an older boy who knows he can get what he wants from her. The final third of the film is also great as the backdrop the couple inhabit moves from the country to the city and there's almost a role-reversal with Camille cheating on her current partner in order to carry on an affair with her first boyfriend. The real problem is the middle section in which Camille is on her own learning how to be an architect and almost resigning herself to a life of loneliness. Despite this Lola Créton is an absolute revelation as the central character at only eighteen years of age she is more believable as the teenage Camille than the one in her later twenties and indeed there isn't much of an effort made to age the lovers that much. Meanwhile Sebastian Urzendowsky shines in the final part of the film as Sullivan really learns how much of a jerk he was to Camille when they were younger. Both the city and country backdrops are shot beautifully by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine who employs some tracking shots when the director really wants to let us get to know a character. Despite the plot lagging in the middle third this is still a lovely piece about first love, growing up and learning what's really important to us. In fact I feel there are a lot of ways that the plot can be interpreted which in my opinion is the mark of an interesting if not a great film.

Verdict: Though it falls down during its middle section Goodbye First Love has a lot going for it including brilliant central performances and lovely shots of the French backdrop so it more than deserves a score of 7.5/10