From this very place, the characters of Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard were taken by a horse carriage even further in time to witness ‘ La Belle Epoque’.
A street cafe, a safe harbor for Louisa’s loneliness and reading the letter from Will, makes no secret of its naming: RESTAURANT PAUL, located at 15 Place Dauphine. The parallels with ‘Midnight in Paris’ go beyond ‘Place Dauphine’ as an overall location for both movies. Unsurprisingly, that as early as five years prior to ‘Me before you’ shooting, the location was already picked on by Woody Allen and his charming ‘Midnight in Paris’ (2011), recapturing an aura of Paris in the 1920s. A charming open space, regarded as a ‘Cinderella of Paris’, ‘Place Dauphine’ has been welcoming Parisians and guests for the latter four centuries. The filming crew favored a cozy ‘Place Dauphine’ square in the West end of the legendary Cite island rather than ‘Rue des Francs Bourgeois’ street in the novel.
#Me before you movie
The author of the book made up a name for a fictional cafe, however, both a novel and ‘Me before you’ movie recreates an aura of a Parisian street cafe to the extent of a breathtaking feel. With regard to a novel of the same name by Jojo Moyes, a basis for the movie adaptation, the envelope in that authentic version included a line of instructions: ONLY TO BE READ IN THE CAFE MARQUIS, RUE DES FRANCS BOURGEOIS, ACCOMPANIED BY CROISSANTS AND A LARGE CAFÉ CRÈME. We catch a glimpse of the main female character, absorbed in her thoughts while reading the last letter from her beloved Will, supposedly meant to be read on this very place in Paris. At once several bikes break in the perspective all while the camera makes a paced move toward, finally, a brick street cafe. A young woman in her wide paints and groceries, carefully mounted inside a wreath basket, dominated by a knowable French baguette. An elderly man, who makes his way across a cozy street with a coarse walking stick from the past. A dynamo young guy, who discomposes a leaf pile with his red boots and a body gilet. A young girl and a man on the front as well as another couple behind. Considering the fact that a maple leaf would rather make parallels with Canada, the movie fills the scene with French coloring and a number of distinctive trigger bells. Thus, the love story of Will Traynor and Louisa Clark comes to an end, thus making space for thousands of similars to come.Ī Parisian epilogue sequence takes up nothing but only four minutes of the narration, yet the cinematography proactively sends out a message on where we are. Two loving birds on the bench with no coincidence resemble two main characters of the story: an appearance of the actors leaves no space for an eventuality. The ongoing ‘end’ of the leaf as a part of the leaf pile under one’s foot in the street underlines a transitional nature of the generations as something pure and natural. For the present story of ‘Me before you’, Will’s life symbolically comes to an end with the purpose to pass the torch of adventures and purposeness to Lou. Another shade of imagery of the scene deals with a connection between those, who have passed away and those who still live.
A motive of a culled leaf classically reproduces an issue of the delicacy of human existence, in this particular case, a heritage of a poet, who has gone (Will as an author of the letter to Clark).
In the course of these few seconds, the story still holds back a direct answer to Will’s fate with cinematic picturesqueness. An inevitable scene of saying forever goodbye between Will and Louisa is superseded by another one: his sleeping suit is to be driven out by an image of the descending leaf.