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Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Leave One Day review — a bland Europop musical about a celebrity chef
It's been four years since the Cannes Film Festival opened with a French musical. That was Leos Carax's bonkers, puppet-filled fever dream Annette, a movie that boasted a surfeit of aggressive cinematic personality and wild signature style. This one is, by contrast, and in the nicest possible way, the anti-Annette. No signature style. No aggressive personality. Very little personality at all, in fact. Instead, it's called Leave One Day (after a generic 1990s hit by the French boy band 2BE3) and features the French singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet as Cécile, a celebrity chef with a high-flying Parisian career who must return to France's rural Grand Est when her father, Gérard (François Rollin), is diagnosed with heart troubles. There, from the unfussy kitchens of
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Partir Un Jour (Leave One Day) review – foodie musical is an undercooked turkey
The opening gala of Cannes can be such a gamble: a very exposed festival slot which few films need or want, and whose occupants so often turn out to be the squawking overfed turkeys of the big screen. Such a one, sadly, is this listless and supercilious musical – ostensibly on the theme of heartwarming home town values – which flatlines like a hedgehog run over by an 18-wheeler the moment the female lead opens her mouth to sing one of the film's many terrible songs. Cécile (played by French singer Juliette Armanet) is about to open a restaurant in the big city having recently won a top-rated TV cooking show, and she is dating her colleague Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab). But when she hears that her adorable, exasperating old dad Gérard (François Rollin) has had a heart attack, brought on by the strain of running the family's truck-stop cafe out in the boondocks with Cécile's mum Fanfan (Dominique Blanc), she realises she must (naturally) put her shallow workaholic lifestyle on hold to go and see him. But of course she runs into her twinkly-eyed ex-boyfriend from the old neighbourhood; this is Raph (Bastien Bouillon), whose heart broke when she just left one day – and what makes it all complicated is that she's pregnant. This bafflingly underpowered, muddled film is the work of Amélie Bonnin, a feature-length adaptation of her award-winning short of the same name. It is burdened by a trite and naive sentimentality that it doesn't know how to make realistically plausible or transform into romanticism or idealism. One of the many things the film can't make up its mind about is food. Cécile is now the fancy purveyor of haute cuisine to discerning diners and she had been a bit snobbish in interviews about the homely fare her old mum and dad used to dish up at the truck stop – and her dad's feelings were hurt. But will she finally see that the simple, homely 'pot-au-feu' cooking has something inspired about it? And that embracing it will demonstrate her new maturity and humility as a chef and human being? Or is it, erm, just slop that she was quite right to deride? We never really find out. Cécile is unconvincing and uninteresting as a devotee of either type of cooking. There is no gusto, no flavour to the music either. When the characters start singing, there is no passion, or even camp enjoyment … just a sense that, don't worry, the lo-cal singing will be over soon and we can get back to the equally bad spoken dialogue. Then there's Raph. Should she really be with him? Should he really be with her? He seems to think so … mooning and swooning over her like he's still a teen. But wait. Raph is actually married, with a kid. So does he feel pain at almost cheating on his wife? At revealing that he doesn't love this woman? Again, we never find out. The subject is never acknowledged. One day, we will have a film where a workaholic from the big city comes back to their home town to realise that their values are boring and oppressive and the big city is morally superior as well as more exciting. It would at least be unusual. Partir Un Jour screened at the Cannes film festival.
Telegraph
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
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.
