This film switches back and forth between two stories. One is 1960's Paris. Jacqueline is a hard-working protective single mother to Laurent who has Down syndrome. Laurent develops a relationship with fellow Down syndrome classmate Véro. The two kids become inseparable no matter how infuriating it is for Jacqueline. In the other story, it is modern day Montreal. Antoine is recently divorced from Carole with two girls. He is a successful concert DJ and he falls for beautiful Rose. There is a surprising connection between the two stories.The 60's story is compelling. I love the kids. The mother son relationship is exceptional. The modern day story is not as compelling. The trial and personal tribulation of Antoine don't hold any interest for me. The back and forth between the stories disrupts the flow. The final reveal is profound, confusing, infuriating, ambitious, and in the end not all together successful. I may like this one better if it played out chronologically.

Cafe de Flore or a coffee on every rebirth. Whether behind our actions stand reasons set out in the untouchable past or we should not deepen so much? At least one thing is certain - the actions we do draw our future destinies, and our relationships with others are the most important.About what we should not be, about - to trust more on our intuition and most importantly, to seek peace and love. You know the saying - if you love something, let it go and if it comes back to you, no one wants it. About breaking with childhood and building a complete figures based on clearly conscious desires and ideas.I give this high rate, because I liked also the boldness of the film. Because its quality did not suffer from the "vulgar" storyline, because it showed that electronic music has messages as worldviews. Because it showed that money does not make happiness - happiness does not depend on them, but the opposite. it needs a balance. And because through the mouth of the medium it connected the world of faith and reason.http://vihrenmitevmovies.blogspot.com/

The cinematography, the use of music and a very dynamic editing (done by Vallée himself) are the strong features of this movie.Unfortunately, when it comes to the 'meat', script, dialogue and acting, the movie is showing weakness. All the main characters are badly played, partly because they don't have a lot to say, partly because the casting is bad. The only good acting is from the 2 kids with Down syndrome.When he comes to 'explain' the characters, Vallée uses very little dialogue. So half of the movie is just watching the main characters smiling stupidly in front of the camera. Or talking to a psychiatrist (I prefer to understand a character in a way that is not a lazy shortcut like this interview).Overall, a movie that reminds me a little bit of Kieślowski (Double life of Veronique) or Terence Malick (the conflict 'resolution' at the end of Tree Of Life).Ambitious movie that only partially succeed.

I scared myself when I cried with the Sigur Ros song in the film, out of blue, in the dark cinema with only 3 other strange people there. This is a film about dream and love, and what are you supposed to do if your dream is all about the one you love, and what if you spend all your life protecting a dream that never meant to belong to you. This is the question in front of Jacqueline and Carole. After all, having a dream that connected to human beings is a dangerous thing to do.Using two parallel story lines is no more a novelty in film making. Yet the film does not give us much information on the relation between the two very different stories—a single mother, Jacqueline, with her Down's syndrome son, Laurent, in 1960s and a couple (Carole and Antonio) facing betrayal and the sequential mental stress today. The only correlations between them are Carole's strange dreams and "Cafe de Flore"—the songs with the same name that people from two spaces and times happened to play. Two and a half hours is a long duration for an independent art film, and in most of the time, these two stories are separately told, slowly and beautifully, and I thought maybe that's it, there would be no overlap between the two stories, until Carole figured out her connection with the mother and son from the last life.I watched Cafe de Flore by myself in a small cinema in the suburb of London. Tranquillity is all you need when encountering a beautiful film like this. Crying like a baby in the cinema, I had to sit there for a while until the film credits finished in order to give myself some time to look normal before going out. And the film is such a great comfort for some reason, it's cathartic. The original soundtrack is another important reason to make the film so moving. Interestingly, Sigur Ros's music video svefn-g-englar featured with Down's syndrome dancers, could be the initial inspiration of Cafe de Flore?