TORONTO – Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallee realized early on that asking his young romantic lead to perform for his ode to love, “Cafe de Flore,” was futile.
Like the seven-year-old lovestruck hero he portrays in the film, 10-year-old Marin Gerrier has Down syndrome, requiring the “C.R.A.Z.Y.” filmmaker to come up with an entirely novel approach to directing.
As a result, shooting effectively revolved around play sessions that were carefully constructed to capture scenes needed for the film.
“I realized very, very early in the process that I couldn’t ask Down syndrome kids to act,” Vallee said in a recent interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“So it’s live…. Of course when you look at this in a fiction it looks like (Gerrier) is acting and he’s a great actor – and he is. But he’s just not pretending … he’s living the experience.”
Gerrier’s precocious Laurent is the singular passion of his devoted but impoverished mother Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis), who indulges his daily pleas to listen to the jazz record “Cafe de Flore.”
Their bond is fierce and unwavering, but when Laurent falls in love with a classmate, it devastates his mother.
The mother-son tale unfolds in 1969 Paris, and is intertwined with that of the tumultuous love life of family man Antoine – a successful DJ in modern-day Montreal torn between two women.
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Kevin Parent’s turn as the tormented Antoine was a surprise discovery too, says Vallee, noting that the 38-year-old is well-known in Quebec as a singer-songwriter but had never acted before.
Vallee says he took a chance in purposefully seeking out a musician for the role.
“Since the character was a DJ we thought: ‘Why not? Why not try to see if there are some musicians out there, singers or DJs that could be up to the challenge and do it?'” says Vallee, whose passion for Matthew Herbert’s track “Cafe de Flore” inspired the romantic tale.
“When Kevin came he blew us away. It was an amazing audition … we could see he’s a natural.”
It’s purely coincidence that Paradis, too, happens to be a musician, adds Vallee. Although he courted the “Joe le Taxi” singer to portray Jacqueline, he says he initially wasn’t sure she would be right for the gritty part.
“I found her too beautiful, too sensual, too sharp, too cool. But she’s an actress right? And when I met her, she spoke so glowingly about the project,” says Vallee, who returns to French-language filmmaking after 2009’s period piece, “The Young Victoria.”
“It was written in the stars that Vanessa Paradis should be in this film.”
Paradis says she was enthralled by Vallee’s lyrical story, a sprawling tale that spans decades, continents and even movie genres by incorporating subtle mystical flourishes.
She also found it easy to relate to the intense passion that Jacqueline held for her only son.
“When you love your child you’d do anything, you’d do anything for your kids,” says Paradis, who has two children with her movie-star partner, Johnny Depp.
“And then you look at the situation that she’s in – in the ’60s, left by her husband, raising her child alone with no money and her child has Down syndrome, with a life span of 25 years.”
Paradis says she struck up a close off-camera relationship with Gerrier, who had the entire crew “wrapped around his finger.”
“We all have been amazed by everything – how he did and the way he learned his lines and did what he was supposed to do, took the directions and everything, that was quite something,” she says.
“And when he didn’t, it brought such organic feel to the scenes where we all had to improvise – the camera men had to move, I had to change, I had to come up with my lines at different moments because sometimes either he decided he was going to change it, or he’d forgot because his attention span is different than ours.
“But this way we all had to improvise a little and let go of the control of ourselves, which most of the time was a good thing for the movie. And probably for ourselves as well.”
“Cafe de Flore” opens in Quebec on Friday before heading to other cities.
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