The Cannes Film Festival’s opening-night ceremony, which took place on Tuesday, reliably hits certain beats.
The show pays tribute to the timeless art of cinema. This year’s host, the actress Eye Haïdara, did her own renditions of famous lines from “La Dolce Vita,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Notting Hill.”
Then the jurors are formally introduced. Park Chan-wook (“No Other Choice”) is this year’s president. He delivered his remarks in Korean, and while it sounded like audience members in the Lumière theater got a translation over the speaker system, that part was inaudible in the TV broadcast shown to journalists in the nearby Debussy auditorium.
Sometimes the festival gives out an honorary Palme d’Or. This year, Elijah Wood presented one to Peter Jackson, his director on “Lord of the Rings,” who seemed genuinely stunned to be there.
“The Palme d’Or is something that I never ever thought I would win, ever, because I don’t make Palme d’Or sort of films,” he said. He noted that he had only been to Cannes twice before: once 38 years ago to sell his debut feature, “Bad Taste,” and a second time in May 2001 to screen advance footage from “Lord of the Rings.”
He called both visits milestones in his career. When he came here to show “Bad Taste,” he said, “I left New Zealand as a photo engraver, and I went home as a filmmaker.” He credited the “Lord of the Rings” preview with changing minds about the project’s potential.
Then Gong Li (in Chinese) and Jane Fonda (in French) declared the festival open, and Cannes followed its timelessness-of-cinema message with another festival tradition: an opening-night feature that is utterly forgettable.
Pierre Salvadori’s “The Electric Kiss” served its limited role as a divertissement for those unfortunate enough not to have dinner plans. The “kiss” of the title refers to a carnival attraction. Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier) performs under the stage name Venus Electrificata. Her act involves taking lovelorn men from the crowd and, for 30 centimes each, allowing them to kiss her while she absorbs electric current through her body. The men get to experience the lightning thrill of love; Suzanne gets to spend her nights with bandaged hands and an ice bowl for her feet.
But one night, a wealthy, widowed painter, Antoine (Pio Marmaï), mistakes her for the carnival medium. He wants to communicate with his wife, Irène (played by Vimala Pons in flashbacks), and Suzanne goes along with it. Soon enough, Antoine’s friend and art dealer, Armand (Gilles Lellouche), frustrated with the painter’s meager output, sees a way to give him a creative jolt. And so Armand begins feeding Suzanne information about Irène.
The scam recalls the novel and film adaptations of “Nightmare Alley,” and if you were really reaching for a reason—any reason—why “The Electric Kiss” should screen at Cannes, perhaps it is best to imagine that the movie was selected as an extremely oblique homage. (Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film with Tyrone Power turns 79 this year—and it’s the 79th Cannes Film Festival.)
But “The Electric Kiss” comes to us, per the credits, “after an original idea” by two directors selected in past editions of Cannes, Rebecca Zlotowski (“A Private Life”) and Robin Campillo (“BPM”). The project actually grew out of Salvadori’s experience acting in Zlotowski’s “Planetarium,” another period piece that dealt with spiritualists.
Provenance notwithstanding, “The Electric Kiss” turns its conceit into something pretty dopey. The film plays the deception for feeble laughs, as when Antoine asks Suzanne, who is wearing vision-obscuring contact lenses to make her look like she’s possessed, for tips on a painting that she can barely see.
“The Electric Kiss” is set in the 1920s, although it’s hard to confirm that until Suzanne starts poaching ideas from Irène’s diary, which mercifully has dates in it. What looks like an effects-heavy production design doesn’t do much to evoke the artistic foment of Paris at the time, and several of the leads’ costumes could pass for contemporary.
The best that can be said for “The Electric Kiss” is that it is harmless (except when treating Antoine’s self-destructive tendencies as yet more targets for yuks). It’s also likely that Cannes can only light up from here.
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