Thanks to Daft Punk, the 1990s French “touch” electronic music scene has its legendary figures, masks and vocoder robot voices and button pushing and all. We’ve got the sound and look, but we’re missing a little fiction to glorify the music’s rise into one of the more influential electronic music movements ever.
Eden, which is screening at the Sundance Film Festival this week, should do the trick of creating a little mythology about the movement that helped popularise house music on a global scale. The story follows a DJ who’s turned off by the rave scene in Paris in the ’90s, and turns instead the the burgeoning global house movement. Parties ensue! Drugs! Trips to New York! And of course, (fictional) cameos by Daft Punk.
The movie is in French, and it’s by director Mia Hansen-Løve who apparently has other credits. I’m mostly interested in Eden insofar as it turns the nerdy, technical perspective on DJs with their samplers and their keys, into a human drama. Indeed, from what we can see in the trailer above, Eden, more or less follows the tropes of films about young innovative people from the conception of a new idea to alienating lovers to the later, wise return to form. There are some nice touches in the trailer already. I particularly like the idea that the DJ hero feels the human soul of the robot voice. Yeah, that’s what this music was about, right? The movie says so. [Palace Films via Pitchfork]