The 78th Cannes Film Festival kicked off on Tuesday with two films—one that’s 100 years old, and another that seems likely to be forgotten by the end of the week.
The official opening-night selection was “Leave One Day,” which on paper was a bold choice. It’s unusual for the festival to hand over this marquee slot to a first feature (the director, Amélie Bonnin, expanded it from a short that won her a César in 2023), let alone one without big stars or an obviously splashy hook. Cannes has had an on-and-off tradition of opting for terrible curtain-raisers, but usually there’s something that makes even those movies stand out: Johnny Depp as Louis XV, say, or an Oscar-winning director remaking the Japanese goof “One Cut of the Dead.”
With “Leave One Day,” the festival has picked a resolutely low-key musical about a chef at an inflection point in her life. It might have gone over well in a sidebar, but putting a big spotlight on it is perverse. This is the movie you show to thousands of people who have traveled from all corners of the globe expecting the best in world cinema? In that context, “Leave One Day” can’t help but inspire an overwhelming sense of, “Get on with it.” There are 22 competition films this year; there’s no time to waste.
The singer-actress Juliette Armanet stars as Cécile, a chef who is preparing to open a restaurant and is still searching for that signature dish — the one “people will share on Instagram,” she says. Cécile previously appeared on “Top Chef,” where she trumpeted her humble origins. (She joked that when she mentioned wanting recognition from Michelin, the locals thought she “had a passion for tires.”) Her parents (Dominique Blanc and François Rollin) run what seems like a pretty good restaurant at a road stop hotel, and to the extent that the film has an arc, it involves Cécile’s return home. Her father is in ill health after a third heart attack and may be refusing the treatment he needs.
Also, Cécile is pregnant. She learns this from a test in the opening scene, before immediately (and without washing her hands?) heading back to the restaurant’s kitchen to school her staff in cutting vegetables. The pregnancy stands to complicate her longtime relationship with her co-worker (Tewfik Jallab), especially once her hometown visit rekindles feelings for the guy she loved in high school (Bastien Bouillon).
And yes, it’s sporadically a musical, albeit one that commits to real settings (no soundstages here or Freed Unit color), which would be a lovely choice if the movie’s songs had any snap or vigor. But apart from the closing earworm, which gives the film its title, the songs are absolutely indistinct.
In short, “Leave One Day” isn’t the movie you show after an opening ceremony where Quentin Tarantino has just bellowed that the festival has begun before literally dropping a mic, or where Robert De Niro, who received an honorary Palme d’Or at the event, used his speech to take on Trump, whom he referred to as “America’s philistine president.”
“In my country, we’re fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted, and that affects all of us,” De Niro said. He added: “The arts are democratic. Art is inclusive. It brings people together. Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity, and that’s why art is a threat. That’s why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists.”
Nor is “Leave One Day” a film with any hope of serving as a chaser to Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” which turns 100 this year and was in effect the festival’s soft opener. (The recent tradition has been to show the first feature of the Cannes Classics sidebar before the starting gun sounds.) Thierry Frémaux, the head programmer of Cannes, asked the audience for a show of hands of who had seen it and not.
This sparkling new restoration, introduced by, among others, two of Chaplin’s grandchildren and Gian Luca Farinelli of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, is an effort to bring back “The Gold Rush” to a version as close as possible to what was shown in 1925. When Chaplin reworked the film in 1942 with voice-over narration, he withdrew the original cut. And although there had been a previous restoration in the 1990s, this updated one is said to be more complete — “a step closer” to the original, per the opening titles, thanks to a worldwide archival search.
Combined with Chaplin’s subsequent score from the 1940s, “The Gold Rush” looks brand-new, and classic bits — Chaplin turning dinner rolls into dancers, or The Tramp and the prospector known as Big Jim McKay shifting the balance of a cabin that they don’t realize is precariously positioned on a mountain ledge — are still marvels. (How did they get that shot of Chaplin flying out of the falling house?) For wit and showmanship, it was the festival’s real opening film.
