Entertainment

‘Café de Flore’ review

Vanessa Paradis excels as a devoted mother determined to help her Down syndrome child have the best possible life in “Café de Flore,” but the film as a whole goes from intriguing to irritating.

It’s an arty and abstract movie set both in France some 50 years ago and in contemporary Montreal. Paradis plays a gritty hairdresser whose fight to get her son a good education is interwoven with a seemingly unrelated story about a present-day, happily married DJ who inexplicably leaves his wife for a girl he meets at a party. At first, the only unifying element seems to be that both the hairdresser’s son and the DJ are obsessed with different versions of the song of the title.

The film takes on a pleasingly dreamlike quality as it explores the interplay of music, love and memory, especially in a sequence built around the Sigur Rós song “Svefn-g-Englar.”

Yet after an exasperatingly lengthy build-up, the secret link between the two stories turns out to be utterly ridiculous, leaving a bad taste at the close.