If you're quick, you might still be able to catch this before it exits cinemas. it's.... alright.
After a brief sojourn into British period drama with The Young Victoria, Quebecois Jean-Marc Vallée returns home for Café De Flore,
and in the process recoups his flair. Vallée juggles parallel plots
with dazzling style; though they take place on opposite sides of the
Atlantic, forty years apart, there’s a fluidity to their non-linear
organisation that very nearly manages to gloss over the incredulity
provoked by their climactic intersection. In 60s Paris, Jacqueline
(Vanessa Paradis) devotes herself wholly to her son’s happiness and
protection; in present-day Montreal, DJ Antoine (Kevin Parent) leaves
his wife for a younger woman and frets about the consequences. Vallée
interweaves these geographically and temporally disparate lives via
audacious editing and a particular emphasis on music’s indelible ability
to trigger memory; unfortunately, the overlaps eventually expose a
flawed and difficult-to-swallow core, the conclusion’s mystical
overtones muffling each individual strand’s emotional impact. But by
almost any other yardstick – visually, editorially – Café De Flore is a revelation.
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