Café de Flore
DIRECTED BY JEAN-MARC VALLÉE
Given the abundant frequency with which we hear Matthew Herbert’s eponymous composition in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore, it’s a blessing that the Québécois director prefers the early-2000s chillout anthem to, say, 1998’s Billboard Hot 100 fixture, “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” As much as any woozily downtempo, vocal-free, accordion-heavy track can scream, Herbert’s track screams “late ’60s Paris” and accounts for the decade-spanning dual narrative of Vallée’s film, which interweaves the tales of a well-to-do DJ (Kevin Parent) in present-day Montreal and a schoolboy with Down syndrome who lives in a shabby Paris apartment in 1969. Vallée’s effort is as easy on the eye as Herbert’s is on the ear, and the filmmaker deserves great credit for the flair with which he integrates his twin timelines. Thematically, though, Café de Flore suggests Vallée might indeed have a soft spot for Savage Garden.
“I Knew I Loved You,” in particular, would have served as an apt alternate title in view of that song’s supremely schmaltzy notions of predestined love and dreaming one’s soulmate into life. Similar concepts are at play in Café de Flore, where a metaphysical connection emerges between Antoine, the DJ, and Laurent, the schoolboy, despite the 40 years and thousands of miles between them. Both are as infatuated with Herbert’s jazzy tune as with the new blondes who enter their lives, as girlfriend and classmate, respectively. Each must also contend with a brunette left jilted by his new fixation. For Antoine, it’s ex-wife Carole (Hélène Florent); for Laurent, it’s Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), his fiercely protective single mother. Apart from the guilt Antoine feels at leaving the mother of his children and ostensible twin flame, he’s blissfully happy in his new relationship, but Carole, in contrast, can’t let go, and is wracked by nightmares that echo Jacqueline’s despair at her son’s displaced devotion.
The inevitable climactic convergence of these threads would be fatally, fancifully soppy were it not for the acute sensitivity Vallée demonstrates in establishing the dynamics of each relationship and in evoking love’s very real capacities to engender both ecstasy and torment. He’s aided by superbly plausible performances, most notably from Paradis and singer-songwriter Parent, and by his talent for evocative pairings of music and imagery, more evident here than even in his music-mad 2005 film, C.R.A.Z.Y. Café de Flore is a romance that may demand a significant suspension of cynicism, but there’s no caveat to its confirmation of Vallée as a burgeoning cinematic maestro.