13/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Amélie Bonnin delivers a staggering work of emotional simplicity, an organic musical whose local roots resonate universally

"Nothing is ever lost, things simply transform". In film terms, the best kept recipes are timeless because human emotions are all drawn from the same source, but it’s still a question of blending them tastefully and artfully, as is wonderfully demonstrated by Amélie Bonnin’s debut feature film, Leave One Day [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which opened the 78th Cannes Film Festival out of competition. It’s "a sophisticated cuisine, inherited from the French tradition", taking the form of a rural musical which this young filmmaker endows with irresistible freshness, delicately pulling on sensitive emotional chords and deftly playing with the genre’s many codes without a hint of pretention.

"It’s nice of you to make food for the local idiots." With two weeks to go until the opening of her very own restaurant, Cécile (Juliette Armanet) - a chef made famous by a very popular TV show - is encouraged by her partner in life and work Sofian (Tewfik Jallab) to head off to the countryside for a few days to stay with her parents (François Rollin and Dominique Blanc) because her dad - with whom she has a strained relationship - has had a third heart attack. But the trip becomes even more complicated following a discovery which Cécile keeps secret, and which she doesn’t receive as a pleasant surprise: she’s pregnant. And then there’s the turmoil of reuniting with her teenage friends, who include her former great platonic love, Raphaël (Bastien Bouillon)…

All the traditional ingredients are on the table for what might be a melodrama (coming to terms with her parents nearing demise, nostalgia for time going by and for youth as it slips away), a social comedy (buried shame for where she grew up, the huge difference between life in the countryside, with its nightclubs, motocross bikes and alcohol-fuelled releases, and the life she needs to build elsewhere) or a film about the return of a former love. Creating a signature dish with a personal touch is all about getting the quantities right and, as she thrusts her protagonist (both charismatic and a "girl next door") into this temporal rift, the French filmmaker (who wrote the screenplay with Dimitri Lucas) strikes the perfect balance and finds just the right pace, managing a flood of existential emotions without a hint of heavy-handedness, instead expressing feelings through the words of twelve songs which powerfully underpin the movie and are ideally incorporated within the story.

Because yes, this is a musical through and through, a veritable magical potion peppered with highly popular French-language hits (Stromae, Michel Delpech, Dalida, Céline Dion, Axelle Red, Bénabar, RSK, Claude François, K-Maro, Claude Nougaro, 2Be3) which have been wholly reinterpreted and which endow the film with a stream of surprising associations streaked with humour and affection, behind its misleading pretext of a straight-forward trip to the countryside where pre-dinner drinks come thick and fast. The movie exudes a bewitching scent, with notes of nostalgia and joie de vivre, tears and laughter, authenticity and archetypes. There might be the occasional cold fish who tries to deny the audacity, control, clarity and sincerity of this first feature film which is remarkable for all its false modesty (some sometimes insist on closing their hearts in the name of intellectualism, distancing the movie from the great art of filmmaking), but it has to be said that Leave One Day is a genuinely staggering experience for those who know how to let themselves go and tune into their emotional sensors.

Leave One Day was produced by Topshot Films and Les Films du Worso in co-production with France 3 Cinéma, Logical Content Ventures and Pathé (with the latter also steering world sales, as well as the film’s release in France today, 13 May).

(Translated from French)