Sunday, December 4, 2011

Cafe de Flore


I've been catching up on some of the films I missed at TIFF this year, including 'Cafe de Flore' which totally devastated me. As opposed to "tragic" young love stories like 'Like Crazy', which just make me feel old and five different types of cynical, 'Cafe de Flore' has so much going for it. It had character development and believable relationships - sorry 'Like Crazy' you were just 2-by-4 and all sorts of lame.

'Cafe de Flore' is also relatively free of bad romantic cliches, and instead has a healthy 'mount of bourgey introspection and a lot of 'fate' talk - which I love, yes, I'm a sucker for some of that interconnectedness of the universe guff, so it ticked a lot of boxes for me. Did I mention the fact that the closest they got to star power was Vanessa Paradis and that she couldn't look further from a 'glamazonian'?

The setting couldn't be further from Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris' Paris either, despite the touristy, nostalgic title, this is no romantic 'City of Lights' type-of-deal. However it still looks beautiful, I guess its hard to make Paris look ugly.

Though the film's tribute to music feels a bit over earnest at the time, it feels true enough for the cheeseball middle aged club DJ character - yes I swear I did actually like this film. BTW that role was sooooo perfectly cast, from the bad tattoo's down to over-sculpted biceps - and his GF toe rings.

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