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This year’s Cannes menu begins with something left over from the sweet trolley: a gooey, slightly moist, funky touch of art that not everyone has the palette or palate for. A pseudo-spiritualist during the most beautiful French Belle époque pretends to be in touch with the deceased lover of a sad and artistically closed artist – but is secretly pressured by the artist, believing that his client’s pleasant contact with this love from the grave will inspire him to start making jewelry again.
The film is directed and written by Pierre Salvadori and the result is like a Woody Allen medium or Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit – although Allen and Coward would have really followed the dead man’s obvious ability to confuse the conspirators by speaking through these fake channels. In fact, this film is no different Cédric Klapisch’s Colors of Time from last year’s Cannes, though it’s a serious and playful comedy.
Anaïs Demoustier plays Suzanne, a young girl in a traveling circus, who has just arrived in Paris, who in her saucy, skimpy outfit on stage is Electric Venus; As his hands hover over two globes of the Van de Graaff generator type, he will kiss the boys in the group for 30 centimes at a time as the lights of true love travel across their lips. As the narrator declares: “It’s not an idea or a metaphor; it’s a real feeling! While Suzanne is in the spiritist’s tent, the sad artist Antoine (Pio Marmaï) appears, wanting to find her dead lover, Irène, a woman whose death she blames herself for, having seduced her.”
Suzanne stares blankly and soon – under the guidance of the magician Armand (Gilles Lellouche) – makes a phone call to her beautiful home, sneakily using contact lenses to hide her invisible connection with the Great Beyond, and looks at every detail in detail. But as Antoine reacts, Suzanne realizes (of course) that she is falling in love with him.
The speed of the film is enhanced by long shots that show us Irène herself, played by Vimala Pons; he is not just a legend but a shrewdly educated art lover whose emotional life is more unpredictable than we imagine. The visuals are there to reveal the secrets that contradict Armand and Suzanne’s deception, but they work better in the slow, long and tense moments. But the film’s silliness and dramatic style were never the same.
