There are some things that only the French can get away with. Halfway through this lovely film, one of the characters said, a propos of nothing, in the middle of a fairly mundane school trip “I’m not so miserable today. There is a gap in the clouds overhead”.
The film starts, in true Gallic style, with the young, beautiful teenage couple, Camille and Sullivan naked in bed together, but everything (for them) goes downhill from here. Camille is 15, vulnerable and intense, Sullivan, 19, keen to run away from Paris, which he hates, to the freedom of South America. Camille, desperately in love with him in the way that one only ever is with one’s first love, cries, tracks his progress on an enormous map tacked to her bedroom wall, and treasures his letters (it’s 1999, presumably before you could get online from any old shack in the middle of nowhere). Eventually, he breaks it off, with the immortal line “I see your face when I’m kissing other people”.
For the rest of the film, we follow Camille, played by Lola Créton, over the sad, lonely next few years of her life. She becomes an architect, settles down with her college professor, and eventually meets Sullivan again. Drawn into an affair with him, she discovers that first love really does stick.
Mia Hansen-Løve, the director, has been getting international attention after her first film, Father of My Children came out in 2009. That film, a family drama with suicide at its heart, gives no easy answers, and makes the audience questions assumptions they didn’t know they held. Goodbye First Love has a similar effect. “Goodbye first love”, as pointed out in the Guardian, is a slightly wonky translation of Un Amour de Jeunesse, as the film doesn’t deal in certainties. The film is unashamedly autobiographical, unsurprisingly; it is just like life.
Some will no doubt find Camille’s character improbable: she is whiney, over the top and obsessive. In other words, the lovestruck teenage girl down to the last detail: able to start fights out of nothing, prone to tears and terribly passionate. Lola Créton, just 16 at the time of filming, is brilliant. Sullivan, played by Sebastian Urzendowsky, is devastatingly convincing as an uncaring teenage boy, thoughtless, impatient, incredulous.
Pleasingly, no facile effort is made to make the character look older over the eight year timespan of the film, they look exactly the same, a subtle point about how little we really change, despite the trappings of adulthood. The film takes its characters very seriously, there is no patronising distance between the viewer and the characters. First love is the most important thing in the world to them, and so it becomes to us, swept along in the narrative.
A special mention, too, for the soundtrack, a pleasingly international blend of French, English and Chilean folk music. A subtle hint that the story being unveiled is a universal one, perhaps.
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