Partir un jour (Leave One Day) is the debut feature by Amélie Bonnin, following the eponymous short in 2021, which I’ve yet to see. It was the surprising opening film of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The film’s synopsis reads that it is about Cécile, who is about to open her own gourmet restaurant, finally making her dream come true when suddenly her father has a heart attack, and she is called back to the village where she was born. Far from the hubbub of Paris life, she runs into her teenage crush. The memories come flooding back, destabilizing her certainties.
It should be added that several scenes derive their narration from French songs from the nineties. They are not dubbed from the original as in Alain Resnais’ masterpiece On Connait la chanson (1997), but sung by the actors in question. How does this work, and how accomplished is this debut that got the highly unusual honour of kicking off a Cannes edition? A wise man recently said that opening films at Cannes rank somewhere between mediocre and awful. Where does Partir un jour fit into that equation? Unfortunately, this is the weakest opening film I can remember. As I mentioned in the past, there is a general rule at The Disapproving Swede’s headquarters to go relatively easy on debutants.
Partir un jour et ses chansons
There are exceptions, such as Hot Milk at this year’s Berlinale. In this case, I would rather lay the blame on the festival committee for the weird, verging on the absurd, decision to expose a young director in the Lumière theatre on opening night for an event that she is clearly not ready for. A colleague, who is the least disapproving person I know, approached me after the screening and said, “What was this?” I didn’t have a proper answer. The weaknesses in the film go all over the board, from the acting to the direction and the overall concept. The opening credits say, “un film imaginé et écrit par”. 1A film imagined and written by.
That is an unfortunate choice of words in a film that lacks imagination and doesn’t excel in its writing. The previously mentioned music numbers make the ones in Emilia Pérez seem palatable in comparison. The staging is inept, and the songs are not particularly well-chosen either. Actually, every element of Partir un jour is uninspired, from the acting via writing to the lensing. That its inclusion in the festival wastes the spectators’ time is obvious, but the blame should not fall on the young director. Which first-time director would pass on such an opportunity? The 2025 Cannes Festival got the worst possible start imaginable.