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 theCannes film festival.