‘The Electric Kiss’ Cannes Review: A Pleasant, Old-Fashioned Romp That Runs Out of Steam

Expectations for a Cannes opening film have been modest for some years now. The slot has effectively been ceded to local distributors looking for a soft launch of something French that will hit commercial theaters within days — a warm-up act for the festival proper rather than any kind of statement. Within those limited parameters, though, there are better and worse experiences, and The Electric Kiss lands among the more respectable ones. A picaresque comedy pitched somewhere between drama and romance, it promises a pleasant, good-natured ride for a good stretch — the problem is that it runs about half an hour longer than it should.

The world it inhabits is close to that of late-period Woody Allen, or certain classical Hollywood comedies from a century ago: a milieu of magicians, spiritualists, circus performers and assorted illusionists, where that particular brand of character finds itself entangled in love stories where the real and the fabricated become impossible to tell apart. The setting is 1920s Paris, and the central figure is Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier), a fairground performer who bills herself as Venus Electrificata and whose specialty is passing an electric charge through her lips when she kisses paying customers. She earns very little for the privilege and in fact owes money to her abusive employer (Gustave Kervern).

One night, by chance, Suzanne finds herself in the booth normally used by Claudia — the fair’s resident medium, who claims to commune with the dead — when Antoine (Pio Marmaï) stumbles in, drunk and flush with cash, desperate to speak with his deceased girlfriend. Rather than admit she has no idea what she’s doing, Suzanne clocks the money in his hand and improvises. The man, too inebriated to question anything, not only believes her but is so moved by what she tells him that he invites her to continue holding séances at his home.

It’s there that Suzanne crosses paths with Antoine’s art dealer (Gilles Lellouche), who notices that the previously despondent painter has picked up his brushes again following these «mystical experiences.» The dealer promptly asks Suzanne to keep the sessions going in exchange for a cut of future sales, and offers her detailed material from both their lives to make the deception more convincing. Antoine walks straight into the trap, and everyone becomes entangled in a story of love, deceit, grief and lies that carries, here and there, faint echoes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The premise is well-constructed and holds together with a certain elegance through the first half, keeping its focus on the increasingly elaborate ways in which Suzanne-as-Claudia manages to keep the bewildered Antoine convinced. But it begins to lose steam and repeat itself as it goes, particularly since the destination is fairly obvious from early on. Director Pierre Salvadori introduces flashbacks to Antoine and Irène’s life together — drawn from her diaries — to show us who she was before she died. The idea is sound, but combined with a plot twist or two too many, it gradually drains The Electric Kiss of the lightness that made it work.

Not entirely. The appearance of Vimala Pons brings genuine magic and charisma to the flashback sequences — watching her, you understand completely why Antoine is so undone by the loss — and a few of the final turns show the kind of wit you’d expect from screenwriters who clearly know their craft. But the film ends up being considerably less enchanting than it might have been at a tighter, more disciplined ninety minutes or so. For the awkward position of opening a festival of this stature, La Vénus électrique doesn’t disappoint. It won’t disappoint on a weekend afternoon on a streaming platform either. Just don’t ask it to be anything more than what it is: a modest, intermittently charming entertainment that knows its lane and more or less stays in it.