“Leave One Day,” Amélie Bonnin’s feature film that opened the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday evening, is an unusual film for a Cannes opener in several ways.
It’s a musical, only the third to open Cannes in this century, after Leos Carax’s twisted “Annette” in 2021 and Baz Luhrmann’s lavish “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001. It’s directed by a woman, Bonnin, again only the third time that’s happened in the 2000s, after Maïwenn in 2023 and Emmanuelle Bercot in 2015. And it’s a first-time feature from a female director; the last time Cannes opened with one of those was, well, never.
In one major way, though, “Leave One Day” is quite similar to other recent Cannes openers, in that it’s likely to be largely forgotten a few days into the festival, quickly overshadowed by other films. A slight character study that strains to be charming but only occasionally gets there, it was the most forgettable thing about an opening-night ceremony that also included tributes to jury president Juliette Binoche and honorary Palme d’Or winner Robert De Niro, along with a song, appearances by Leonardo DiCaprio and a boisterous Quentin Tarantino and a speech by De Niro that torched Donald Trump.
After all of that, it would take a substantial movie to make much of a mark on the Croisette. And “Leave One Day” (“Partir un jour”) is not without some appeal, but it’s just not very substantial. At best it’s gently amusing, which made it a bit anti-climactic on Cannes’ opening night.
The film is based on Bonnin’s short that won France’s César Award for Best Fiction Short Film, which she not only expanded but also overhauled and gave a gender reversal. While the original short concerned a man who returns to his hometown and runs into his childhood sweetheart, the feature focuses on a female chef who has won “Top Chef” and is on the tension-laden verge of opening her own restaurant in Paris when she gets a call that her father is in the hospital after suffering his third heart attack. Oh, and she’s pregnant, too.
French pop star Juliette Armanet stars as Cécile, who reluctantly returns to her hometown to help out in the truck-stop diner her parents run. It turns out that her father has checked himself out of the hospital, and he also keeps a notebook full of all the casual ways in which she put down small-town life and small-town cooking while she was on TV.
Cécile’s stress level is off the charts, but there’s a wrinkle in her tightly-wound demeanor: Every so often, she breaks into a French pop song from the last couple of decades, often as not joined by whomever she’s talking to at the time the music started. It’s a cute conceit, but also a fairly one-dimensional one, because for the most part Cécile is cheery when she’s singing, glum when she’s not. The songs don’t exactly advance the plot; they just push the pause button and let everybody enjoy themselves for a couple of minutes.
One occasional duet partner is Raphael (Bastien Bouillon), a motorcyclist who could be considered an old flame if your standards of what constitutes a flame are pretty low. It seems to have been mild flirtation that never even rose to the level of a kiss, though he and Cécile are curiously drawn together, considering that she’s pregnant with another man’s child and he’s married with a son.
Then again, “Leave One Day” is a curious movie on a lot of fronts. It’s a musical, but the songs are sporadic and little more than amusing. The funniest and most effective use of music comes when Cécile and her current boyfriend are arguing: He pauses, a guitar begins to play and you just know that a song is about to start — but then Cécile’s mom walks in and interrupts them, killing the musical interlude before it even begins.
The movie seems to be trying to be quirky, but it’s never quirky enough, and it’s hard to feel much for the characters or feel that there’s much in the way of healing going on. But it’s breezy enough to be mildly diverting and gently nostalgic, so maybe it’s best to think of “Leave One Day” as the little appetizer that’s been served before Cannes brings out the big meals.
