Café de Flore, an uncommon love story that spans decades, is told in a cross-cut back-and-forth style that showcases two very different landscapes—1960s Montmartre, where Vanessa Paradis’ character is a single mom of a young boy with Down syndrome, and present-day Montreal, where hometown actor Kevin Parent is navigating a thorny midlife crisis. The movie talks about that but what comes out is love, the power of love, the goodness of love and the destruction of love in all its forms.

“The script had me captivated and I lived very beautiful moments on set,” says Paradis. “I saw the film for the first time yesterday, and it was very clear to me that it’s about love, in all its forms—there is a bit of each character in all of us. It’s a movie that makes you think, and feel, and dialogue—while we were shooting, I felt inspired and full of oxygen and I relived that a bit last night while seeing the movie.”

Paradis says that she was attracted to the project by the script, as well as the prospect of working with Vallée, who also wrote the script. She says he’s a director who’s “all heart, as good at the emotional side of a story and the technical aspects of shooting a film,” and that she is looking forward to premiering the film in Montreal, a city she loves.

“The movie was born here, and it comes out in France a lot later,” she says. “The premiere in Montreal is the first time we’ll all be together with the Canadian cast and crew, it’ll be great.”

Vallée, for his part, says that though he adores shooting in Paris, he was happy to film half of his story at home in Montreal, where he was delighted to be able to ride a Bixi to work on-set—a rare privilege, he says.

“I had to shoot in Plateau Mont-Royal because it was a perfect setting for this story,” says Vallée. “My characters live near Parc Lafontaine and I shot in the park with all the chairs on Roy and St. André. Ultimately, the Plateau Mont-Royal was perfect to establish these characters and to setup a landscape that was totally different from the scenes in France. I still live there, I love it there, and it’s where my characters can flourish. The other place I’d like to live and work, is in the Mile-End, because you have Café Olympico and Genevieve Grandbois with her caramels a fleur de sel. Oh yes.”

The Café de Flore premiere and red carpet is on September 14 at the Cinéma Impérial. The film opens in theatres on September 23.

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Mordecai Richler, author of St. Urbain’s Horsemen and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is probably Montreal’s most famous writer. When Barney’s Version, the film adaptation of his most famous and last novel, opens in theatres on December 24, the world will have a chance to revel in the life and locations of Barney Panofsky, Richler’s autobiographical anti-hero.

Oscar-nominated American actor Paul Giamatti, who plays Barney, told us during the Toronto International Film Festival what he thought of Montreal:
“Amazing city. I frickin’ loved it. I really thought, if I was every going to live somewhere else, I would like to live in this city.”

There aren’t any official tours of Richler’s favourite haunts, but he was well-known to enjoy downtown bars such as Ziggy’s, Sir Winston Churchill’s, and Grumpy’s. In the film, several pivotal scenes are filmed at the Ritz-Carlton Montreal, a gorgeous old Grand Dame of a hotel on Sherbrooke St. West’s Golden Square Mile. The Ritz has historically been very important in the cultural life of Montrealers, and is currently being renovated to its former glory.

Visit the website for scenes in the hotel’s ballroom and garden, including a wedding, the shoot pulled the original china and furniture out of storage, and consulted wedding planners who had organized events there during that period. Both Richler himself and the fictional Barney Panofsky lived in the imposing Le Chateau apartments across the street from the Ritz.
Producer Robert Lantos has also said that he was intent on using the real streets—Peel, Bishop, Sherbrooke Sts—that Barney frequents in the book, as well as the real locations whenever possible.

Guest blogger: Melora Koepke

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Montreal-set Mesrine: Killer Instinct the latest major motion picture to showcase the city’s atmospheric neo-Noir setting… After a long 2-year wait since its release in France, Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the first part of Jean-Francois Richet’s diptych about 1970s French bank-robber/folk hero/international playboy Jacques Mesrine, opens in select North-American cities. A-list French actor Vincent Cassel (he played opposite Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, and in Stephen Soderbergh’s Oceans 12 and Oceans 13) gained twenty pounds and several configurations of appealing retro facial hair to slip into the skin of Mesrine. 

But to my mind, the most appealing thing about the sexy, technicolour period extravaganza that is Mesrine: Killer instinct were the parts when Mesrine packs up his moll (Ludivine Sagnier, from Swimming Pool) and transplants to mid-1960s Montreal. Mesrine lands in Montreal in 1968, when the city was becoming prominent on the international jet-set all sexed up from Expo ’67 and the skyline is studded with architectural marvels like Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 and all the beautiful Expo buildings in Parc Jean-Drapeau, that are shown off in the movie’s establishing shot for the Montreal years, which is a sweeping helicpoter pan of the whole skyline from the south over the St-Lawrence river.

Mesrine meets a co-conspirator in the form of Jean-Paul Mercier, played by Quebec’s most famous actor, Roy Dupuis. But all this got me thinking about how so many sexy noir period flicks have been filmed here. Despite the countless movies that are filmed in Montreal with the Old Port doubling as Paris, Rome, New York and even Tangiers, as many come to mind that were filmed here with our beautiful city in a starring role… The Score, Frank Oz’s atmospheric character study/heist flick starring Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Marlon Brando in one of his final roles.

Mesrine opens in select North-American cities this week-end

Guest Blogger: Melora Koepke

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