Imagine Bernard Blier walking out on Arletty at the end of "Hotel Du Nord"(1938).Heading for the country,he meets Blanchette Brunoy in " Goupi Mains Rouges"(1943) .He falls in love with her and and takes her back to Paris where they open a café .
This could be "Le Café Du Cadran" (Dial Café).Although the place is located near the boulevards and the opera ,we never feel we are in Paris ,for the action takes place in the café for most of the scenes ;we hardly catch a glimpse of the outside world .
"Le Café Du Paris" is some kind of populist Nouvelle Vague (the epithet "populist " is necessary for the N.V. was anything but populist) .This movie is an incursion into primitive Nouvelle Vague before the Word (and its creative limits ) had been defined:there's no real story ,the screenplay is very loose ,it's a shoestring budget (even the stars Blier and Brunoy were not huge at the time), the dramatic element only appears in the next-to-last sequence (like in Chabrol's "Les Bonnes Femmes" ).But it's definitely not N.W. as the die hards love it: Godard,Truffaut and co filmed on location.
There's no plot,unless the bookmaker ,the journalists and the violinist count .There are no real subplots either ,the subplots which were used by Duvivier in some of his best films or by Carné in "Hôtel Du Nord" .That's why "Le Café Du Cadran" may seem tedious to some:its main interest lies in its atmosphere ;we know it was made after WW2 because there is a pinball in the café ,which would have been unthinkable before the coming of the Americans.
