When you think about all of the care and style and politics and planning that go into the yearly execution of the Cannes Film Festival, you’d assume that developing with a tasty and satisfying opening-night movie — a film that delights, or at the least pleases, the competition viewers, stoking its urge for food for the treasures to come back — wouldn’t require the French equal of rocket science. The opening-night choice needn’t be the finest movie within the competition; it hardly must be a main movie. However certainly it ought to be an inviting one.
But there’s a wierd karma that adheres to the Cannes opener. Merely put: It’s not often superb, and infrequently a semi-washout, to the purpose that there virtually appears to be an underlying design to this explicit programming selection, as if the competition wished us to really feel, “Okay! The quality is only going to go up from here.” Contemplate the openers from the final 10 years: Woody Allen’s middling rom-com “Café Society” and Jim Jarmusch’s middling meta zombie flick “The Dead Don’t Die”; the horrible fake zombie comedy “Final Cut”; “Everybody Knows,” an Asghar Farhardi movie no person favored; the postmodern whimsicality of top-heavy artwork fruitcakes like Leos Carax’s “Annette” and Quentin Dupieux’s “The Second Act”; the schlock quasi-scandal of “Jeanne du Barry,” starring a nonetheless semi-canceled Johnny Depp as Louis XV; the melodramatic shambles of Arnaud Desplechin’s “Ismael’s Ghosts”; and the flavorless ratatouille of final yr’s celebrity-chef musical, “Leave One Day.” Not precisely a roster of satisfaction.
That stated, let me beat round no bushes in stating that “The Electric Kiss” (“La Vénus Électrique”), the film that kicked off Cannes this night, stands out as the worst competition opener I’ve seen in a decade. It’s a “light” period-piece romantic triangle, set in Paris throughout the ’20s (with in depth flashbacks), that follows a determined carnival performer; the well-known painter she acts as a psychic for (despite the fact that she’s not a psychic); and the girl he liked from the previous. The director, Pierre Salvadori, is described on the Cannes web site as being an ardent devotee of the custom of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards (although perhaps solely in France would that third title be yoked to the opposite two). In “The Electric Kiss,” it’s clear that Salvadori is aware of how one can stage a scene, and that he’s attempting for one thing — a confection with soul. The movie begins out as a farfetched farce of phantasm after which grows extra…sophisticated.
However right here’s the factor: It additionally grows stultifying. Hollywood artists like Lubitsch and Wilder have been magicians who knew how one can lure in an viewers. Whereas Salvadori has conceived “The Electric Kiss” as a movie about pretend magic, but there’s no spirit of actual magic underlying the fakery that’s alleged to be playful however is definitely leaden.
We’re led into this convoluted bauble by Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier), who has been an indentured carnival employee since she was 15 (when her father offered her into the enterprise), working every month for a measly stack of francs, killing her distress with doses of laudanum. She’s one of many carnival’s featured points of interest: “Vénus Électrifica,” who arrives on stage in tarty make-up and fishnets, as a siren of want, whereupon a male buyer is invited to come back up and kiss her, a kiss that might be so electrical he’ll expertise the fervour of a lifetime. However this occurs by a change getting thrown, which sends volts of electrical energy coursing via Suzanne and the volunteer. The film is attempting to wink on the mysteries of the age of Tesla and Edison, however as an alternative the harmful stunt simply makes us recoil.
Hungry for meals, Suzanne wanders into the empty trailer of the carnival’s veteran spiritualist and winds up being mistaken for her. To make some money, she agrees to do a séance with Antoine Balestro (Pio Marmaï), who remains to be grieving the lack of his beloved spouse, Irène. He’s additionally, as we study, a well-known artist who in his distress has stopped producing artwork. That’s why his supplier, the pompous, domineering Armand (Gilles Lelouche), realizes that Suzanne may very well be the reply to all their prayers: If she will be able to persuade Antoine that Irène remains to be “here” and speaking with him, he is likely to be impressed to renew portray, and thus proceed to create artworks that may be offered for a good-looking value. Placing on foggy blue contact lenses, calling Antoine “my little sausage,” Suzanne pretends to summon the spirit of Irène, however what she’s actually doing is attempting to purchase her method out of her circus servitude.
The plot is already stodgy. It’s like some carny-barker model of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” all hinged to the concept Antoine is so susceptible in his despair, so open to the ability of suggestion, that he’ll consider something — which makes him a quaintly uninteresting sap. Pio Marmaï brings nothing dynamic to the half, and the entire idea has a deflating flatness to it: the “great artist” as gullible human lox. It doesn’t assist that Julien Poupard’s overly lush cinematography begins to make the film appear like it was shot via a filter of rosé.
However there’s one other layer to all of it. Snooping round Antoine’s mansion in order that she will be able to unearth convincing info, Suzanne stumbles onto Irène’s diary from 1919, and we flash again to Antoine’s relationship together with her, which is half the film. Vimala Pons, in strawberry-blonde bangs, is a hanging actor who performs Irène as the brand new fashionable lady. This really implies that Antoine isn’t sufficient for her — and albeit, he’s so insufficient that we will’t even consider he’s an vital painter. The film fumbles the prospect to do one thing arresting with this seminal interval in artwork. However that’s as a result of its actual curiosity lies in taking the 2 ladies’s relationships with Antoine and layering them on high of one another. He’ll now fall in love with Suzanne via her “channeling” of Irène, an concept so strenuous and conceptual that it by no means takes to the air, and turns into frankly exhausting to look at.
“The Electric Kiss” needs to be a romp and a lethal critical film, a lofty meditation on love and artwork and phantasm that can be as lusciously stylized as previous Hollywood corn. Perhaps that’s why it was chosen because the opening-night movie at Cannes: It appeared like an leisure which may have one thing for everybody. However “The Electric Kiss” is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its personal conceits that I believe it would find yourself satisfying just about nobody.
