When you consider all the care and taste and politics and planning that go into the yearly execution of the Cannes Film Festival, you’d think that coming up with a tasty and satisfying opening-night film — a movie that delights, or at least pleases, the festival audience, stoking its appetite for the treasures to come — would not require the French equivalent of rocket science. The opening-night selection needn’t be the best film in the festival; it hardly needs to be a major film. But surely it should be an inviting one.
Yet there’s a strange karma that clings to the Cannes opener. Simply put: It’s rarely very good, and often a semi-washout, to the point that there almost seems to be an underlying design to this particular programming choice, as if the festival wanted us to feel, “Okay! The quality is only going to go up from here.” Consider the openers from the last 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 faux zombie comedy “Final Cut”; “Everybody Knows,” an Asghar Farhardi film nobody liked; the postmodern whimsicality of top-heavy art fruitcakes like Leos Carax’s “Annette” and Quentin Dupieux’s “The Second Act”; the schlock quasi-scandal of “Jeanne du Barry,” starring a still semi-canceled Johnny Depp as Louis XV; the melodramatic shambles of Arnaud Desplechin’s “Ismael’s Ghosts”; and the flavorless ratatouille of last year’s celebrity-chef musical, “Leave One Day.” Not exactly a roster of pride.
That said, let me beat around no bushes in stating that “The Electric Kiss” (“La Vénus Électrique”), the movie that kicked off Cannes this evening, may be the worst festival opener I’ve seen in a decade. It’s a “light” period-piece romantic triangle, set in Paris during the ’20s (with extensive flashbacks), that follows a desperate carnival performer; the famous painter she acts as a psychic for (even though she’s not a psychic); and the woman he loved from the past. The director, Pierre Salvadori, is described on the Cannes website as being an ardent devotee of the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards (though maybe only in France would that third name be yoked to the other two). In “The Electric Kiss,” it’s clear that Salvadori knows how to stage a scene, and that he’s trying for something — a confection with soul. The film starts out as a farfetched farce of illusion and then grows more…complicated.
But here’s the thing: It also grows stultifying. Hollywood artists like Lubitsch and Wilder were magicians who knew how to lure in an audience. Whereas Salvadori has conceived “The Electric Kiss” as a film about fake magic, yet there’s no spirit of real magic underlying the fakery that’s supposed to be playful but is actually leaden.
We’re led into this convoluted bauble by Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier), who has been an indentured carnival worker since she was 15 (when her father sold her into the business), working each month for a measly stack of francs, killing her misery with doses of laudanum. She’s one of the carnival’s featured attractions: “Vénus Électrifica,” who arrives on stage in tarty makeup and fishnets, as a siren of desire, whereupon a male customer is invited to come up and kiss her, a kiss that will be so electric he’ll experience the passion of a lifetime. But this happens by a switch getting thrown, which sends volts of electricity coursing through Suzanne and the volunteer. The movie is trying to wink at the mysteries of the age of Tesla and Edison, but instead the dangerous stunt just makes us recoil.
Hungry for food, Suzanne wanders into the empty trailer of the carnival’s veteran spiritualist and winds up being mistaken for her. To make some cash, she agrees to do a séance with Antoine Balestro (Pio Marmaï), who is still grieving the loss of his beloved wife, Irène. He is also, as we learn, a famous artist who in his misery has stopped producing art. That’s why his dealer, the pompous, domineering Armand (Gilles Lelouche), realizes that Suzanne could be the answer to all their prayers: If she can convince Antoine that Irène is still “here” and communicating with him, he might be inspired to resume painting, and thus continue to create works of art that can be sold for a handsome price. Putting on foggy blue contact lenses, calling Antoine “my little sausage,” Suzanne pretends to summon the spirit of Irène, but what she’s really doing is trying to buy her way out of her circus servitude.
The plot is already stodgy. It’s like some carny-barker version of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” all hinged to the idea that Antoine is so vulnerable in his despair, so open to the power of suggestion, that he’ll believe anything — which makes him a quaintly uninteresting sap. Pio Marmaï brings nothing dynamic to the part, and the whole concept has a deflating flatness to it: the “great artist” as gullible human lox. It doesn’t help that Julien Poupard’s overly lush cinematography starts to make the movie look like it was shot through a filter of rosé.
But there’s another layer to it all. Snooping around Antoine’s mansion so that she can unearth convincing information, Suzanne stumbles onto Irène’s diary from 1919, and we flash back to Antoine’s relationship with her, which is half the movie. Vimala Pons, in strawberry-blonde bangs, is a striking actor who plays Irène as the new modern woman. This actually means that Antoine isn’t enough for her — and frankly, he’s so inadequate that we can’t even believe he’s an important painter. The movie fumbles the chance to do something arresting with this seminal period in art. But that’s because its real interest lies in taking the two women’s relationships with Antoine and layering them on top of each other. He will now fall in love with Suzanne through her “channeling” of Irène, an idea so strenuous and conceptual that it never takes wing, and becomes frankly exhausting to watch.
“The Electric Kiss” wants to be a romp and a deadly serious movie, a lofty meditation on love and art and illusion that is also as lusciously stylized as old Hollywood corn. Maybe that’s why it was chosen as the opening-night film at Cannes: It seemed like an entertainment that might have something for everyone. But “The Electric Kiss” is so overcalculated, so stuffy and labored, so infatuated with its own conceits that I suspect it will end up satisfying virtually no one.
