OIFF Film Review: “Café Flore”

— by Paula Treneer —

Released in 2012 to wide acclaim, “Café Flore” by Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée is a meditation on romantic and maternal passion, and a tribute to the role of music in our emotional lives.

The plot follows three disparate threads that develop simultaneously through artistically shot cross-cuts, flashbacks and flash forwards. One story line features Antoine, a successful Quebecois D.J., whose life is presented at the story’s outset as a triumph over life’s challenges: health, love, and financial success (the French voiceover captures the poetic cadence better: “en pleine forme et a l’abri de tout souci financier… deux filles magnifiques… et une nouvelle femme…”)

Antoine has left his high school sweetheart and wife of twenty years, after falling for the lovely Rose (Evelyne Brochu). The film explores both his romantic passions and marital guilt, while underscoring the importance of music in his life. He and his ex-wife Carole (Helene Florent) bond over music as adolescents; later we see his daughters tease him about it; and the eponymous sound track—named not for the famous Parisian Left-Bank café as one would expect, but a jazz track off an easy-listening album—is linked to the party where he and Rose first meet.

A seemingly unrelated thread develops in 1960s Paris. Jacqueline (played superbly by Vanessa Paradis in an uncharacteristically unglamorous role) is a single mother raising a son afflicted with Down’s syndrome. Her fierce attachment to and vigilance over her handicapped son becomes almost an obsession as her story progresses.

The relationship between these two storylines remains unclear, however, until the film explores Carole’s post-divorce trauma. Plagued with grief over the loss of her marriage, she suffers bouts of sleepwalking and puzzling dreams. Yet the meaning of her dreams is only revealed at the film’s end, in a mystical leap that shifts the film from meditation on romantic love in a fantastical direction that some viewers may appreciate.

The film is superbly acted, especially Vanessa Paradis, who plays Jacqueline convincingly, sans make-up; a well-deserved Genie award welcomed her performance. The musical selections chosen to accompany these characters at crucial stages in their life’s development are marvelous, ranging from recognizable tracks from Pink Floyd and the Cure to others which cognoscenti will no doubt appreciate.

In a bonus to Orcas Film Festival audiences, “Café Flore” director Vallee introduced his film and participated in a Q&A discussion after the following film “Demolition,” which he also directed.