Pierre Salvadori's "The Electric Kiss" opened the Cannes Film Festival to mixed results, delivering a film bursting with ambition that ultimately struggles to find its focus. The French director crafted what reads as a carnival saga with romantic entanglements and period flourishes, yet the film never settles into a coherent identity.
The opening night slot at Cannes carries weight. It signals the festival's faith in a project and sets the tone for the entire competition. Salvadori's entry promised fizz and energy, the kind of crowd-pleasing spectacle that festival programmers often seek for inaugural screenings. The bones of several films exist within "The Electric Kiss." A costume drama lives there. A romance blooms elsewhere. A character study attempts to emerge. The pieces never cohere.
What IndieWire's review identifies as the film's central problem rings true for contemporary cinema broadly. Directors and studios increasingly hedge their bets. Rather than commit fully to a single narrative vision or genre, they layer multiple approaches atop one another, hoping broader appeal emerges from the mixture. Instead, the result dilutes each element. The romantic stakes weaken. The period texture becomes backdrop rather than character. The carnival atmosphere, initially beguiling, outstays its narrative purpose.
Salvadori has demonstrated skill in French cinema before. "The Taste of Others" and other earlier works showed his facility with ensemble casts and light social observation. "The Electric Kiss" suggests a director caught between commercial instinct and artistic conviction. The film runs long enough for viewers to recognize what it might have been under sharper editorial discipline.
Opening Cannes requires nerve. The festival's glare exposes everything. A film that plays it too safe reveals its calculation immediately. Salvadori's gamble here involved abundance rather than restraint, throwing resources and plot threads at the screen in hopes something would stick. Instead, abundance became excess. The carnival dissolved into chaos.