13-05-2025
Leave One Day: The feeblest Cannes opener in a decade
The French chanteuse Juliette Armanet is perhaps best-known in the UK for her role in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last year. Readers may recall her singing John Lennon's Imagine while gliding down the Seine on a polystyrene meteorite, as her accompanist's grand piano, also on board, was set on fire.
Anyway, this spectacle turned out to neatly foreshadow the diabolical opening film at Cannes this year, in which Armanet, making her acting debut, plays the lead role. A 'realistic musical' that is in fact neither of those things, Leave One Day is such a haplessly cobbled fiasco that it could almost serve as a sort of Viking funeral for the entire musical genre, which it sends bobbing off into the night as it burns to a crisp.
Armanet plays Cécile, a famous TV chef on the cusp of a high-profile restaurant opening, who returns to help out at her parents' humble roadside cafe due to her father's ill health. Dad (François Rollin) is drily unimpressed by his daughter's ascent, and keeps a notebook containing all of her quips about her working-class upbringing, which he pulls out and reads from at the slightest excuse.
But inevitably Cécile's overdue reconnection with her roots leads to a zing-pow Ratatouille Moment in which inspiration for a new signature dish strikes. She's also secretly pregnant by her boyfriend and colleague Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab), which adds a bittersweet note to a reunion with high school sweetheart Raphael (Bastien Bouillon) – a local fisherman-slash-motocross biker who has himself since settled down, but clearly still carries a torch.
This stupefyingly bland plot is shored up by regular musical numbers: all lyrically tweaked covers of French karaoke favourites. And it is hard to capture just how mortifying it is when the first one kicks in; at the critics' screening earlier today, it felt as if the roof of the Salle Bazin was descending on the audience like the burst guts of a hot air balloon. Cécile and Sofiane are talking shop in their office, when the former suddenly hops up a small staircase and breaks into a tuneless rendition of Stromae's Alors on Danse while flapping his arms around, panic flashing in his eyes.
First-time feature director Amélie Bonnin (the film is an expanded version of her prize-winning short) clearly wanted these sequences to reflect how her characters would actually sing and dance in these situations. And that collision of theatrically and naturalism can, if handled properly, be thrilling – it worked out pretty well for Jacques Demy. But realism isn't the same thing as clumsiness, and the biggest moments here look either simply under-rehearsed, or as if their participants have yet to be sold on the gimmick. A nightclub brawl which opens with Raphael and his cronies belting out December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night) is such a mess that I lost track of where the singing stopped and the fighting began.
Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014's Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit. Things Can Only Get Better, The Only Way Is Up: insert your preferred please-let-this-be-as-bad-as-it-gets anthem here.
