With America not only spinning out of control but threatening to take the rest of the world with it, the Cannes Film Festival can be a place to play out that tumult, to see it writ large — on the big screen, where over the next two weeks it inevitably will be. It hardly matters that the films showing at Cannes were made before Trump took office. Movies are psychic, and always have been. It’s all but assured that a number of Cannes offerings this year — and, indeed, the very vibe of the festival — will channel the new world disorder.
But there’s another side to Cannes. Each year, the festival presents itself as a sanctuary, a ritzy oasis, a cinematic shelter from the storm. That’s the cozy bourgeois side of Cannes. Just look at the official poster for this year’s festival. You might have expected it to be an old-movie image that nodded, in that lusciously oblique iconic-Cannes-poster way, at the chaos that’s unfolding now. But instead the lords of the festival chose a pair of shots from “A Man and a Woman” (1966), with the title characters embracing on a beach — a vision of love you could argue is almost didactically retrograde. “A Man and a Woman” wasn’t even a great movie in its time; it was a fake art film, an elevated piece of art-house kitsch. But choosing it for the poster is a reminder that Cannes doesn’t always want to be on the cutting edge. It also wants to pave the way with comfort food.
If there’s any doubt of that, consider the film that opened the festival tonight, “Leave One Day (Partir un jour).” It’s a trifle, and not even fully successful on its own small-bauble terms. But oh, is it ever meant to bathe you in a warm retro glow.
Let us count the ways that “Leave One Day” is designed to be an up-to-the-minute yet backward-glancing art-house-lite experience. It’s the story of a celebrity chef, Cécile (Juliette Armanet), who is based in Paris but known everywhere she goes for having been a fixture on “Top Chef,” where she was a finalist with her lobster bisque soufflé. That her downbeat but regal kitchen vibe echoes Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy on “The Bear” is the film’s first user-friendly ingredient. The second one is that the movie, within 10 minutes, turns out to be a musical — not some old-fashioned production-number thing, or some newfangled postmodern thing either, but one of those casual sentimental “realistic” musicals, with the characters voicing their thoughts in a no-frills way. It’s like a French John Carney film with a nod to “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”
“Leave One Day” has a tidy story about Cécile returning to the village she grew up in, where her parents, who are also chefs (but of a much lower order), still spend their days cooking up hanger steak and frites in the truck-stop restaurant they’ve owned and operated for decades. (Cécile learned to cook there.) Back in the country, where everyone thinks “Michelin” refers to a tire, Cécile takes a break from making stock…to take stock, which she needs to do because in the opening scene she learns that she’s pregnant. The father is her culinary partner (Tewfik Jallab), and they’re about to launch a new flagship restaurant, which Cécile still hasn’t settled on a signature dish for.
This feels, for a while, like an engaging situation, though in a semi-nostalgic way; at times I felt like I was watching a Nathalie Baye movie from the ’80s. Consider it a garnish on the film‘s gently addled feel-good aura that its director and co-writer, whose solo debut feature this is (and that’s a first for a Cannes opener), is named Amélie Bonnin. It’s a coincidence, to be sure, yet that name, with its evocation of one of the last French films to become an international sensation on the order of “A Man and a Woman,” ices the cake of “Leave One Day’s” inviting confectionary spirit.
If only it were a better movie! I went with it for a while, because Bonnin is a graceful and flowing filmmaker. I enjoyed the casual everydayness of the musical numbers — at times they’re just snippets — that pop out of the story like the fruits in a plum cake, only to return us to that rather neutral tone of semi-documentary drama that has been the house style of French cinema since the days of Maurice Pialat. Juliette Armanet, who’s a huge pop star, is relatively new to the big screen, but she’s a natural actor, with a look and aura that evoke the Meryl Streep of decades ago: quick, pensive, wary, with neurotic feelers that catch just about everything.
Cécile has returned to her hometown because her grumpy father (François Rollin) has suffered a third heart attack, and her ebullient mother (Dominique Blanc) doesn’t want him working anymore. But this isn’t much of a conflict. The sauce thickens, however, when Cécile runs into Raphael (Bastien Bouillon) and his buddies, who she was friends with in junior high. These jokers are still just hanging out and having the same old drinking parties. But Raphael, with his two-toned locks, is tall and handsome, and he and Cécile enter some sort of fuzzy flirtation zone. Which proves, after a while, to be rather aimless.
Is Cécile going to terminate her pregnancy? She announces, from the outset, that she plans to (we can certainly see that having a child wouldn’t fit into her high-maintenance kitchen-as-church lifestyle). But if the film’s drama is going to mean anything, Cécile needs to evolve in some way. Eric Rohmer was the master of revealing how seemingly tiny emotional shifts could be monumental choices of destiny, and I think that’s what Amélie Bonnin is going for, but instead she has made a movie in which her heroine, by the end, moves from Point A to Point A. Her return to the land of her youth — the parents, the friend she maybe loves — doesn’t quite dent her armor. Which makes “Leave One Day” a bit of a contradiction. It wants us to get all melancholy and wistful about someone too self-actualized to change.
