The Thousands

Thirty year-old French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s The Father Of My Children was one of the highlights of 2010′s French Film Festival. With its slow-building characters and an overly naturalist script it was one for the cineastes, but had a beauty and richness of feeling you’d struggle to find in a more traditional film. Hansen-Løve’s latest effort Goodbye, First Love is impressive for much the same reasons.

The beautiful Camille (Lola Creton) is a 15-year-old jaded with teenage life: she finds reason to live only in lover Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), four years her senior. Sullivan is a free spirit and takes off to South America for a year, telling Camille to ‘forget him’. She takes it pretty hard (we don’t blame her – Sullivan is a total babe) but four years later is killing it at French architecture school, and has moved in with her wealthy, silver fox lecturer (echoing Hansen-Løve’s real life love with film director, Olivier Assayas, whom she met when she was 17 and he 43). But then Sullivan comes back on the scene, and revokes the whole ‘forget me’ thing – cue dangerous liaisons and teary emotional dilemmas.

Goodbye, First Love is a delicate and affective film, with Hansen-Love’s direction knowing but unpretentious. In a similar vein to recent indies Norwegian Wood, Blue Valentine and Like Crazy, it’s a non-happy ending driven inspection of first love’s folly turn complex, without the benefit of age’s perspective.