La Belle Aurore: Casablanca & Looper

As Time Goes By

Time Travel

Loves

Lives

Aurore

Aurora

After Sam (Dooley Wilson) plays "As Time Goes By," yet again, (in Casablanca, 1942) we find Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Rick (Humphrey Bogart) talking about that special day in a special cafe in Paris:

Ilsa: I wasn't sure you were the same. Let's see, the last time we met... 

Rick: Was La Belle Aurore. 

Ilsa: How nice, you remembered. But of course, that was the day the Germans marched into Paris. 

Rick: Not an easy day to forget. 

Ilsa: No. 

Rick: I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.

La Belle Aurore in Casablanca was 

shown only in flashback scenes 

and via the shadow of its window.

Perhaps it is an inside joke or not, but in the new movie entitled Looper about time travel, (get it, "As Time Goes By"?), we find a cafe named La Belle Aurore. Also, there are overlapping themes of who is whom, and what is what between Casablanca and Looper.

Some folks on the Internet mistranslate La Belle Aurore as "the beautiful sunset." It appears that the more proper translation is "the beautiful dawn."

The name Aurora means "dawn." The Roman goddess of the dawn was named Aurora, and her siblings are Sol (Sun) and Luna (Moon). These names in Latin and Greek are Aurora/Eos, Sol/Helios, Luna/Selene.

(Needless to say, in La Belle Aurore we also find the power word "Bell," as well, which I have talked about here.)
This is a year in which the word Aurora (vis-a-vis The Dark Knight Rises shooting and Aurora copycats) is all too significant.  It does appear to be synchrocinematically symbolic for this La Belle Aurore to reveal itself now in a time travel film.

Some set photos from Rian Johnson's sci-fi film Looper are presently on the Internet, courtesy of On Location Vacations. The futurist cars are shown outside La Belle Aurore.

Photo of La Belle Aurore as seen in the movie Looper. The fictional film's location for this cafe, in reality, is 219 S Rampart St, off Common Street in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Besides time travel, a subtle sub-theme is twins/ids too, for in Looper, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is transformed into a younger version of Bruce Willis through the magic of prosthetic makeup.

Hat tip to Mark for a hint to a Looper link.