‘Leave One Day’ review: Cannes opens with crowd-pleasing musical of ‘exceptionally Gallic’ flavour

Dir: Amélie Bonnin. France. 2025. 96 minutes.

Nudging into her early forties, Cécile (Juliette Armanet) is about to embark on a brand new chapter in her life. A former winner on a TV cooking present, she is days away from opening her personal restaurant in Paris. Quickly, although, she’ll uncover she is pregnant, and her father (François Rollin) turns into ailing. Returning house to rural Grand Est in northeastern France, Cécile reconnects along with her teenage almost-sweetheart, Raphaël (Bastien Bouillon). Her wistful memory for the previous is echoed within the movie’s use of musical numbers – the solid sporadically launches into variations of well-seasoned French pop classics. Amélie Bonnin’s Cannes opener – the primary debut movie ever to play within the pageant opening slot – is a crowd-pleaser with an exceptionally Gallic flavour (a flavour that non-Francophone or Francophile audiences would possibly discover a bit overpowering). 

A movie with a hearty urge for food for nostalgia

Go away One Day shares a title and a fundamental theme with Bonnin’s César-winning 2021 debut quick movie. It additionally, in Bouillon and singer-songwriter Armanet, boasts the identical key solid members. Right here, nevertheless, the roles are reversed: within the quick movie, it was the male character who returns to the small city of his youth and reconnects with the woman he left behind. Switching the gender roles within the characteristic model was an astute resolution: it makes for a meatier dramatic arc, since Cécile’s state of affairs is difficult by her physique clock. A testy father-daughter relationship provides weight to the story, all of which Armanet, in her first lead function, tackles with a convincingly frayed and pissed off efficiency.

The musical numbers, carried out with an unpolished gusto, are extra hit-and-miss of their enchantment. Sing-along ballads and pop stompers, first carried out by artists akin to Dalida and Claude Nougaro within the 60s and 70s, and more moderen tracks such because the title track, ’Partir Un Jour’, by the late 90s boy band 2be3 – it’s all music particularly chosen to ring a bell with French audiences. These usually are not, nevertheless, songs that are prone to have the identical nostalgic pull for punters exterior of France. Equally, this can be a image that’s prone to play much more efficiently domestically than in different territories.

What Bonnin captures notably nicely is the working-class rural milieu by which Cécile grew up. There’s a distant kinship with Louise Courvoisier’s breakout hit Holy Cow within the unsentimental and earthy depiction of French countryside communities, worlds which appear to be powered by alcohol, petrol fumes and sporadic outbreaks of violence.

Raphaël, now a mechanic together with his personal storage, is in some ways nonetheless the identical feckless teenager that Cécile as soon as knew. His duties have expanded however his leisure actions nonetheless primarily contain pulling wheelies on dust bikes and ingesting in automotive parks. And that, along with the enduring query of what might need been, is a part of his enchantment. With a enterprise to run, a menu to plan and an undesirable being pregnant to take care of, an uncomplicated, floppy-haired charmer with an impish grin represents a short lived respite from the burdens that Cécile has shouldered in her high-pressure life in Paris.

Much less comfy is her relationship with the kitchen by which she grew up. Her highfalutin haute delicacies is a world away from the strong peasant fare her father serves at his truk cease cafe – one thing that she made clear in a sequence of sniffy feedback throughout her stint on the TV present. Her abrasive, cussed father saved a written file of her each assault on his conventional type of French delicacies, taking specific umbrage over her criticism of the macédoine salad. Not totally unexpectedly, Céline’s seek for a signature dish is finally impressed by the meals she shared along with her dad up to now. That is, in spite of everything, a movie with a hearty urge for food for nostalgia.