13-05-2025
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
