Un amour de jeunesse (2011)
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

Film Review

The pain of separation is the theme that welds Mia Hansen-Løve's distinctive first three films into a beguiling trilogy.  The absence and loss of a father preoccupy the director's first two films - Tout est pardonné (2007) and Le Père de mes enfants (2009) - and in her third she addresses, with as much feeling and acuity, the agony and the ecstasy of an adolescent's first love.  Un amour de jeunesse is a cruel but poignant meditation on the transience of love which occasionally gets carried away with its own self-conscious artistry but which is endowed with such wisdom and delicacy that it can hardly fail to enchant and move anyone who watches it.  After watching this film you are left in no doubt that Hansen-Løve is one of France's most gifted and humane filmmakers.

What the film depicts is fairly anodyne - a young woman's emotional journey as she makes the painful transition from mid-teens naivety to early adulthood.  When we first meet Camille -  portrayed with an astonishing degree of authenticity by Lola Créton, a young actress who is bound to go far - she is clearly heading for a fall, having pinned all her hopes on an even more mixed up youngster named Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky, another impressive talent), for whom she is only one port of call in his adolescent globetrotting adventures.  The heart-tearing anguish of the separation to come is already apparent at the start of the film but becomes excruciatingly evident when the teenagers try (and fail) to enjoy a brief holiday together in the Ardèche before Sullivan jets off to South America to 'find himself' by himself.  It's as if the burden of love is too much for either of them to bear, and so Sullivan skedaddles up his own private Idaho, leaving poor Camille to bear the cross alone, and of course it crushes her.

When we next meet Camille, some years have elapsed and she is now a confident young architecture student.  She looks visibly older and yet the scars of her first romance are still detectable, and it is with some difficulty that she embarks on her second amorous adventure, with an older and more settled man, Lorentz.  There seems to be very little passion or commitment in Camille's relationship with Lorentz.  It's a calmer affair, neither side expects too much, love is no longer an adventure but a nice to have accessory.  After the storm-tossed turmoil of adolescence Camille finds herself in more peaceful waters - until Sullivan suddenly re-enters her life, scarcely altered by the intervening years.  Again, Camille is haunted by the vision of a love that can never die.  Will she be taken in a second time or has she matured sufficiently to see through this most destructive of illusions?

The constantly shifting moods of the central protagonist and her growing maturity are subtly evoked by the changing visual composition of the film - the photography as much as the location.  The wintry Parisian setting that features at the start of the film has the feel of a melancholic fairytale.  When we finally see Camille, it is in a wistfully sunny paradise somewhere in the south of France - the sadness is still there, but there's also a sense that Camille is no longer prey to her childish delusions and is free to make the best of what life offers her.   Un amour de jeunesse is a simple film that treads a familiar path, and yet Mia Hansen-Løve invests it with such a wealth of human feeling that it can hardly fail to take you with it.

Film Synopsis

You never forget your first love, and when it ends - as surely it must - you feel you will never get over it.  This is something that Camille, a fifteen-year-old girl, knows to be true after separating from the boy she has lost her heart to.  For a whole summer she and Sullivan, a lad four years her senior, enjoyed the most idyllic of romances.  Camille thought they would never part, but of course they did, once the summer was over and the golden glow of first love had lost its lustre.  By then, Sullivan had made up his mind to give up his studies so that he could go off to South America for several months with his friends.

Camille is still too deeply in love to even think about parting, but after a brief stay together in the Ardèche Sullivan has made up his mind that they must go their separate ways.  He promises to keep in touch with Camille, but within a few months of his departure he stops writing to her.  Heart-broken, the abandoned teenager attempts suicide.  Four years later, Camille is studying architecture when she falls in love for a second time.  Her new lover is an older man, a well-known architect named Lorenz.  This love affair turns out for the best and Camille soon finds herself in a stable and happy relationship with a man she is devoted to.  It is at this inopportune moment that Sullivan suddenly re-enters her life...