Café de Flore: Twin Flames in an Enlightening Film

Is unconditional love a blessing or a disease? Can emotional commitment enslave both the lover and the beloved? Is it fair to assume that the object of one’s obsession will share that feeling forever and at full incandescence? And if the beloved moves on, how does a person continue to live, to breathe, when her heart has been broken? With wondrous power and subtlety, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore poses these conundrums and doubles down on them, by telling two stories, in two times and on two continents, of women who love not wisely but too well...

For 12-year-old Simon, the resilient central character in the Swiss drama "Sister," the ski season is a time of particular purpose. His daily gondola-lift rides to a tony mountaintop resort are not about sport but a matter of enterprise, a way of surviving. In the rarefied air of leisure and disposable income, Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) is a skinny stealth figure, and back in the lower altitudes he's an assured salesman, hawking the skis and gear he's stolen to neighborhood kids. Mike, a British seasonal worker (Martin Compston) from the resort restaurant who catches him red-handed, is dumbfounded to learn that Simon's escapades aren't the thrill rides of a bored kid — it would be easier to dismiss him as a smart aleck having fun. But Simon steals out of need. The particulars of that need emerge in bits and pieces, emotional land mines that detonate with understated power in writer-director Ursula Meier's incisive and economically told film. ("Sister" is Switzerland's submission to theAcademy Awards' foreign-language category.)