Café de Flore

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.