Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée's Café de Flore is destined to go down as one of the most polarizing movies to reach U.S. shores in quite some time. It's big, it's bombastic, it takes excursions into fantasy, it goes for broke emotionally, it's so visually overwhelming that it would make Nicolas Roeg blush, and Vallée interpolates hallucinatory dream sequences, trippy cross-cutting, and portentous, perhaps impenetrable symbols. Café will also provide additional evidence for anyone out to disprove aesthetic consistency in Quebecois cinema: In lieu of the stylistic economy of recent movies from the province such as Nuit #1 and Vital Signs, we actually get something closer to French director Gaspar Noé's mind-bender Enter the Void or Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Yet one also cannot fault Vallée for this reason: The movie's cinematographic kinesthesia seems ideally paired with its subject and themes, and it is difficult to envision this story taking flight given any other form. Café isn't a perfect motion picture -- it suffers from one crippling tonal miscalculation that restrains it from achieving full sway. But it is fascinating and never boring, and -- like 2005's C.R.A.Z.Y. -- it affirms Vallée as a craftsperson of great technical and visual prowess and a raconteur of startling imagination and narrative invention.
Full disclosure: The emotional impact of this film depends on one major surprise. Those without any knowledge of the movie who plan to see it are strongly advised to skip the remainder of this review; others who wish to read on do so at their own risk.
We're initially handed two seemingly unrelated stories, set more than forty years apart. One takes place in Paris circa 1969, where hairdresser Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis) single-handedly raises her little boy, Laurent (Marin Gerrier) -- a child with Down syndrome. Jacqueline is an obstreperous, demonstrative, occasionally foul-mouthed young woman, but she loves her son ardently, and refuses to accept the limitations that society places on him. Seven-year-old Laurent meets and forms an instant emotional attachment to Véro (Alice Dubois), a little girl his age who also has Down syndrome -- but Jacqueline questions the appropriateness of the relationship. The children, however, throw tantrums and physically protest whenever adults try to separate them -- and Véro's parents encourage Jacqueline not to intervene.
In the second story, set in 2011, Kevin Parent plays Antoine, a Montreal DJ living with his young daughters and Rose (Evelyne Brochu), a lover he adores. Good-looking, in perfect health, and financially well-off doing a job he loves, Antoine epitomizes happiness and self-actualization. A wrinkle exists in this tale, however, in the form of Carole (Hélène Florent), Antoine's ex-wife; the two met as teenage sweethearts, were inseparable for years and had two children together, but Antoine left one woman for another and in the process, emotionally damaged Carole, who has long believed that Antoine is her soul mate and still yearns for him. The children fail to comprehend their father's decision and grow irate at him.
For much of the running time, we segue back-and-forth between the two subplots, and instinctively sense that a connection exists between them, perhaps one along the lines of Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. This is and isn't true: Narratively, Vallée uses the same sort of last-second denouement reveal that Villeneuve did, though the revelation in Café asks us to read more deeply into the subtext than Villeneuve did. It will likely be the most divisive element of the movie for the extremity of the twist, but Vallée cannot be criticized for it, because the movie never defies the logical fabric that it sets up from the outset. As fabulous as that final narrative leap is, we do get an implicit disclosure of its hidden truths throughout the movie -- both in the hallucinatory presentation that pervades so many of the scenes (manifested most pointedly in the parallel editing) and in a quick glimpse of some expository details in Carole's bedroom during one critical scene. Only those who are truly observant, and willing to invest in the movie the energy, care and attention that it demands, will catch this and be more prepared for the final leap. But that twist will play more smoothly for them as a result.
This is all exhilarating to experience, but as mentioned earlier, the picture unfortunately buckles beneath the weight of a key error in judgment on Vallée's part. This lies in the mishandled tone of the Antoine-Rose-Carole story. As played by the slick Parent (whose evocation here is about as warm as Michael Fassbender's emotionally damaged character in Shame) Antoine unintentionally comes across as callow and selfish -- we're evidently supposed to care about him, and to empathize with his decision to leave Carole for Rose -- but he isn't an average, relatable guy. He's a slightly egotistical übermensch sans a trace of humility, and his attainment of "everything" life can offer guarantees his aloofness from us at the outset. Vallée missteps even more gravely in his failure to more clearly delineate the emotional differences between the two adult romances. The depiction of the Carole-Antoine history paints the separated husband and wife as unreserved soul mates, an idea that the movie eventually sets out to disprove. And even if we initially share Carole's deluded perspective about her relationship with her ex-husband, it isn't at all fair for us to also be confined to that impression for 120 minutes. For the Antoine-Rose-Carole sub-story to play effectively, we need a godlike vantage point that reveals to us, even as Carole remains in the dark, the fact that Rose's spiritual compatibility with Antoine far supersedes her own. Instead, the two romantic relationships seem almost indistinguishable -- a murkiness further complicated by the fact that, in an injurious decision that temporarily throws the movie way off the rails, Vallée interpolates two erotic underwater sequences featuring Antoine in the same nude, intertwined pose with each woman. We're made to feel that the women are interchangeable, and worse, that Antoine is something of womanizer, a user who has brought each lover into this same erotic scene. All of this restrains the subplot from the emotional kayo that it could have delivered, the sort that exists from the outset in the Jacqueline-Laurent tale.
As indicated, though, this gaffe occurs amid such skill in other aspects of the film that one can forgive the writer-director for his one key lapse. Like Terrence Malick, or Francis Ford Coppola in his 2009 movie Tetro, Vallée revels in narrative wizardry on such a level that he instills the medium itself with the sort of scope and dimension usually found in huge, sprawling novels, and a degree of cinematographic experimentation that feels refreshing. The movie is like a giant, well-oiled machine that hurtles us effortlessly back and forth across forty years, and then suddenly unveils theretofore hidden truths about the characters and the dual intertwined stories that occupy center stage. Reflecting on this picture, you can marvel at the overwhelming journey that it's taken you on, even if some of the key stops along the way failed to reach their full potential.