When one is 15 years old, every new love feels like a romance for the ages, and every breakup resembles a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. So it is with Camille (Lola Créton), the passionate but self-doubting young protagonist of French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s new feature, Goodbye First Love. When the viewer first meets the sweet-but-serious Camille, she is neck-deep in a tempestuous romance with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a dreamboat with an easy grin and a restless nature. He offers adoring proclamations, but Camille senses that he is a wanderer at heart, and that his affections are shallow and ephemeral.
Romantic miserablism is the norm for adolescents, and Camille exemplifies a particularly brittle and pedantic species of lovelorn girl. (She actually declares, “I feel melancholy.” Ah, the French.) She is also, unfortunately, entirely correct about Sullivan. He departs France to tour South America with his friends, and although he writes faithfully for a time, eventually the letters stop arriving. Months roll on. Following a flirtation with suicide, Camille eventually pulls herself up and moves on. Years later, the film finds her studying architecture under the wing of Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke), a middle-aged professor with a passion for modernism. Years later still, the pair are sharing a house and working as partners at a Paris firm. Camille seems content at last, but a chance encounter places her into contact with Sullivan. He’s back in France, and just as charming and handsome as ever. Camille, despite herself, begins to feel stirrings…
One or two less-than-revealing asides with Sullivan notwithstanding, Goodbye First Love maintains a fairly resolute focus on Camille. The film’s visual underlining of time’s passage stresses that it is concerned primarily with the heroine’s long emotional recovery from her adolescent romance, and the assimilation of that romance into her adult self. Of course, the portentous re-appearance of Sullivan eight years later highlights the risk of such assimilation: That a 15-year-old girl still lurks inside Camille, full of poor judgment and co-dependent obsession.
It’s an intriguing notion, but not one either Hansen-Løve’s script or actress Créton seem capable of conveying convincingly or thoughtfully. The characterization of Camille is shallow, resulting in moments when her behavior seems inexplicable. Moreover, the arc of her life offers more tedium than revelation in the end. Goodbye First Loves plainly wants the viewer to empathize with Camille’s plight, but it succeeds only at creating a plodding, arm’s-length narrative of loss and recovery, followed by more loss and recovery. The film ultimately feels arid and directionless, fiddling half-heartedly with themes of place, memory, and longing that have already been explored so expressively in features ranging from Walkabout to Brokeback Mountain.
