Electric kisses at the Cannes Film Festival

Special correspondent to the Cannes Film FestivalIn a scene from La Vénus électrique, the comedy of sentimental and artistic entanglements that opened the Cannes Film Festival this Tuesday, one of the characters reproaches the painter played by Pio Marmaï that the paintings he has just shown him are laborious, well-made, correct. “In short, horrible,” he concludes. It would be unfair to apply such a strict judgment to Pierre Salvadori’s film, which can also be seen as an effective exercise in film craftsmanship, discreet but with a certain charm and good acting. Its main problem is, once again, the context: opening the world’s most important festival is not easy for a film that seeks an audience with no other intention than to entertain and elicit a few smiles. An ambition that at Cannes can even seem countercultural.

Anaïs Demoustier plays Suzanne, a fairground performer who, in Paris a century ago, performs in a very peculiar circus act: connected to an electrical device, men in the audience pay to kiss her at the same time as electricity runs through their bodies and causes them “a painful ecstasy,” especially her, whose palms are burnt from repeating the number so many times. However, one day she poses as a medium to extort a few francs from a painter tormented by guilt and grief, and she begins to see him regularly, as her fraudulent sessions – which she carries out with the interested complicity of an art dealer – unlock his creativity and make him paint again.

La Vénus électrique could be limited to exploiting the inherent comedy in the game of false identities of the medium and her predictable infatuation with the painter, but it goes further when, through the discovery of the diaries of Irène, the painter’s deceased ex-partner, Suzanne becomes trapped by the story of this fascinating woman, a lover of art and artists who does not resign herself to the role of a muse. This unexpected turn of the film and the polished writing of a script with more layers than initially seemed – co-written, among others, by Robin Campillo – compensate for the academic rigidity of Salvadori’s direction, which has an impersonal air that does no favors to a film that, incidentally, is released this very Tuesday in cinemas in France, a festival tradition that demonstrates the intimate relationship between Cannes and the French film industry but which, necessarily, limits the range of possibilities when choosing the opening film.