Mstarz-99shaftesburyave

Direct by : Miao Wang

2010

fiamma

Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée

With: Vanessa Paradis, Kevin Parent, Hélène Florent
2011

Until the end, you don’t quite know where the two stories are leading to, but you feel like following them – just like the characters.

Montréal, the present. Antoine (Kevin Parent), forty, is a successful DJ. He has everything life can offer for happiness: two beautiful daughters, a big house, a successful career as an international DJ and Rose (Evelyne Brochu) his lover, who he deeply loves. Antoine’s ex-wife Carol (Hélène Florent) has been having a recurrent dream, which she cannot explain and that relates to her recent dramatic separation from her husband.

Paris, the 1960s. After having given birth to Laurent (Marin Gerrier), affected by Down Syndrome, Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis) is abandoned by her husband, and she is left on her own to provide for her son. When Véronique (Alice Dubois), a little girl also affected by Down Syndrome, enters Laurent’s life, Jaqueline’s compulsive love for her son pushes her to tragically separate them.

Café de Flore is one of those movies in which everything reveals its meaning at the end, including the association of these two stories. One can be grateful to director Jean-Marc Vallée, however, for not having turned Café de Flore into a spiritualistic, medium pamphlet or a spooky sequence of unsettling coincidences (even though the final shot is quite chilling). Instead, each story maintains its own integrity and plausibility to the end: even though the final resolution is a take or leave it, one cannot deny that Jacqueline’s story remains a beautiful, tragic one on its own.

The uncanny aura of the film is down to its editing and to the music, which plays a role in the movie which goes well beyond the classic soundtrack. While both stories maintain a progressive narrative structure, their flow often stops and condenses in some crystallized moments of visual intensity: the embrace of two naked bodies in the artificial turquoise of a swimming pool, the racking silent cry of a standing sleepwalker. Violent jump cuts and juxtapositions in between the two stories often transpose the feelings of one into the emotions of the other. Flashbacks, memories, dreams often erupt into the narrative present. Some scenes are unsettlingly repeated throughout the movie, ambiguously shifting their meaning each time.

An omniscient voice gives a prologue to the film. Following this reassuring opening, however, Café the Flore is a movie struggling with its own meaning. Its tentative flashbacks, its obsessive close-ups, its sudden changes in pace make the movie appear as the difficult work of a mind trying to acquire awareness beyond time and space. Visually, the movie breathes the faded colours and the loose edges of a polaroid picture. Perhaps not only for aesthetic reasons. Images appear as far away, embedded into a mystic aura, into a different light. Their final meaning will appear on the surface, slowly, ghostly yet indelibly.

What the end of this story will mean to you is a personal matter – but there's something deeply tantalizing about the unity of urgency and destiny, ferocity and forgiveness, impossibility and eternity which these two stories embody.

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
Written by Mia Hansen-Løve

with Lola Créton, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Magne Hårvard Brekke
2011

The film opens in the summer of 1999. Camille (Lola Créton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) are enjoying their time together before he leaves on a gap year to South America. They go on holiday to the countryside, swim, hike and make love. After he is gone he keeps in touch via love letters, with her tracking his journey through pins in a map, but their frequency steadily decreases until she is forced to contemplate continuing her life without him. Although not before the most half-assed suicide attempt ever. We move to her studying at university, in a silly architecture school sequence that’s meant to show her attempting to cope with her loss, but merely explains why buildings in Paris got a bit stupid. She starts a relationship with her tutor (Magne Hårvard Brekke), and appears to be moving on into a stable adult life. The reappearance of Sullivan confuses things once again, however, and she must overcome the conflict between her past and present loves.

Anyone making a romantic drama needs to be certain about at least one of two things: either they’re approaching from an angle that hasn’t really been done before, or the romantic leads are strong enough to carry the entire film. I don’t imagine I need to point out that teenage love has been covered pretty heavily in the past, and the pseudo-philosophy and achingly meaningful one-liners that pass for dialogue here offer absolutely nothing new. As for the two leads, they both have three facial expressions: ‘smile’, ‘cry’, and, the most common one by quite a margin, ‘neutral’. The script and the performances completely fail to make Sullivan or Camille remotely likable, so you’re left struggling to give a shit about these two intensely self-absorbed children and their wholly personal problems. Whether you want to call the performances bland or naturalistic, it doesn’t matter; the point is that their lack of energy doesn’t gel with the pretensions of the script.

To be fair to Hansen-Løve, she doesn’t seem to take her characters’ woes at face value, either. While she never convinces you that Camille needs to do anything other than get a grip, the story is still essentially about her growing out of childhood, and all the irrationality and immaturity that implies. A couple of times, at key moments of grief, she is gently told by her parents, “OK…you need to be getting over this now”, a position far easier to sympathise with than almost anything else in the film. Unfortunately, this recognition of the problems in identifying with Camille just means that the performances and general dialogue constitute an even larger misstep. If their situation isn’t to be taken seriously, then we have to care about the characters enough to stick with them and watch them overcome their deficiencies. In this case you're waiting for them to pull themselves together, with fraying patience. 

I know I’m being obtuse about the relative unimportance of Camille’s grief, but I do think the script goes beyond failing to convince or endear the protagonists, and actually overstretches itself with the perspective it takes. I almost laughed in disbelief during the second act when it became apparent that it was four years later, and she was still concealing her grief within a diary. If the audience isn’t emotionally convinced on something that basic, then how are we supposed to care about what’s happening? There’s a hint that Camille and Sullivan may have been childhood friends before falling in love, which admittedly would give a lot more weight to their relationship. The starting point of their time together is left ambiguous, but this is an example of subtlety actually damaging a detail that would help you engage with the story. In any case, the clue appears after it’s been more like seven years since their initial break-up, so is a case of too little too late really.

Tom