Review: Café de Flore

After a brief detour into period filmmaking with The Young Victoria, director Jean-Marc Vallée returns to a story of love and finding one’s place in the universe in his latest film Café de Flore. While tonally, this film is closer to his beloved C.R.A.Z.Y., it is Café de Flore that might end up standing as Vallée’s ultimate masterpiece. It is also the best fictional Canadian film of the year, thus far.

Vallée follows the lives of four people in present day Montreal and 1969 Paris as their experiences with love and loss become intertwined. Antione Godin (Kevin Parent) is a jet-set living DJ with two kids from a previous marriage who are offended that he wants to marry his new girlfriend so soon after divorcing their mother, Carole (Hélène Florent), who has been experiencing crippling nightmares and an increased penchant for sleepwalking and silently screaming at night.

Carole is experiencing visions of a woman named Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis) from Paris who is similarly going through pains of the heart. The father of her son wants nothing to do with the child because he has down syndrome. As her son ages, he falls in love with another similarly afflicted classmate at school and they become quite literally inseparable.

As with C.R.A.Z.Y., Vallée takes a look at how music shapes the way people think and process memory, and he employs one of the best soundtracks ever put to film to illustrate his points beautifully. Everyone from Pink Floyd to Sigur Rós and The Cure play vital parts in the story of the film, but it’s the jazzy title track that ultimately links the two disparate stories together in a clever and bittersweet way.

Vallée also manages to offset the obvious misery facing these characters by including much needed bursts of happiness. The audience doesn’t just get to see Antione automatically becoming insensitive, but they get to watch the slow descent from the true love he felt for Carole in the 1980s before his eye began to wander. Jacqueline starts as someone who fights to have her son accepted by everyone around him as an equal, but she is ultimately threatened by the powerful pull of new love threatening to come between them. It is a singularly unique look at the nature of love, divorce, and rebounding that is as real as it is bittersweet.

Vallée has assembled a great cast for the film and he directs them to wonderful performances. Parent plays Antione as being surprisingly sympathetic. This is a man aware of his own demons past and present and is willing to deal with them head on. Florent plays Carole as someone desperately trying to keep things together for the sake of her children. She is unaware that she is perpetually living in a state of shock. Paradis shines as a mother who is equal parts loving, smothering, and paranoid; like any good mother should be.

I first reviewed this film when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month and slightly took it to task for taking a final act turn towards mysticism that I didn’t think rang entirely true. The more I think about it, however, the more I realize just how much that aspect of the story stuck with me. Much like this year’s Tree of Life, Café de Flore is dealing with some extremely heady issues that can’t always be rationally explained. I still don’t think it’s entirely necessary, but I have a greater appreciation that it’s there. It is that very imperfection that makes the ending (which occurs during the credits, so don’t take off immediately) have the gut punching impact that it does. It contributes a final resolutory note that will stick with viewers long after the film has ended.

Café de Flore opens September 23 in Quebec.

Rating:  

Rated G
Cast: Vanessa Paradis, Kevin Parent, Hélène Florent
Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée

Top image: A scene from Café de Flore. Courtesy Alliance Films.