Like the run-down carnival in which it is set, Pierre Salvadori’s “The Electric Kiss” is a little clunky, kind of messy and oddly entertaining. You couldn’t say that it started the 2026 Cannes Film Festival with a bang on Tuesday night – the evening’s biggest star was Honorary Palme d’Or winner Peter Jackson, who got his award in a ceremony that preceded Salvadori’s film – but it was at least fun to watch a movie that veered uneasily but charmingly between melodrama, romp, tragedy and romantic comedy.
In a way, this is par for the course for Cannes, which in recent years has given its opening-night berth to a string of movies that delivered sporadic pleasures but were never among the highlights of those festivals: Amelie Bonnin’s curious “Leave One Day” last year, preceded by Quentin Dupieux’s goofy “The Second Act,” Maïwenn’s inert “Jeanne du Barry,” Michel Hazanavicius’ wacky “Final Cut” and Leos Carax’s wild musical “Annette.”
“The Electric Kiss” takes place in the Paris of 1928 and begins at a carnival where the sideshow barkers promise excitement and wonder, but the looks of drudgery on the faces of performers and customers suggest otherwise. A woman in a red cloak, Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier), trudges through this picturesque and stylized landscape with a look that lands midway between desultory and defeated.
As “Venus Electrificata,” she’s one of the establishment’s star attractions, though she comes by that status not because of any particular skill, but because she’s pretty and willing to endure pain. She stands on a stage with her hands above a pair of orbs while a barker invites men to kiss her – and when somebody pays to do just that, a backstage switch is flipped and electricity surges into the orbs, jumps to her hands, travels through her body and gives the would-be suitor a shocking experience that the more dimwitted take to be love.
Suzanne, we learn later, was sold to this carnival by her family at the age of 15, and she endures a life of painfully burned hands for a pittance: When she gets her weekly pay, it amounts to less than nine francs after expenses. So it’s no surprise that she steals opium from the more lavish trailer where a purported psychic, Claudia, conducts séances, rubbing it on her hands as a painkiller and helping herself to a bit of Claudia’s food while she’s at it.
Before she can leave the trailer one night, she runs into a grieving artist, Antoine (Pio Marmaï), who offers her a substantial sum of money to contact his late wife, Irene. Suzanne fakes it, using tricks of the psychic trade that she picked up while lurking around Claudia’s trailer – and before long, she’s making house calls to Antoine’s place, where he’s been unable to paint since his wife and muse died a few years earlier.
The film is about layers of deception: Suzanne pretends to be Claudia and pretends to be a skilled medium, but it’s all a con supported by Antoine’s art dealer, Armand (Gilles Lellouche), who wants his star painter back at work and will pay Suzanne whatever it takes – 150 francs for a regular size painting, 200 for a big one — to get her to go along with the ruse. “Are there any scruples in that big body?” she asks him. “It is spacious,” he assures her.
“The Electric Kiss” is rooted in desperation, but it feels light, and at times melodramatic. But why shouldn’t it be? The characters themselves are acting, and as often as not overacting, as Suzanne slips creepy contact lenses in and out of her eyes without Antoine noticing, “faints” anytime it’s convenient and shouts, in the purported voice of Irene, “Live! And paint! Paint the world for me! Paint frescoes, and huge canvases!”
It’s a nice scam, with Suzanne aided by inside info supplied by Armand and later by Irene’s secret diary, which prompts a series of flashbacks that find the movie jumping between the story of Antoine and Irene and the story of Antoine and Suzanne-as-Claudia playing at being Irene.
Salavadori (“Priceless,” “The Trouble With You”) hangs onto the light touch; at times, it feels as if he wants to go all the way and turn the movie into a comedy of misadventures, but he has more on his mind than that even as the plot gets a little meandering and the narrative drive slackens.
To the surprise of no one, Antoine and Suzanne develop feelings for one another, and of course that causes complications and accusations and a big mess from which the filmmaker finds a way to extract his characters. His solution may be silly, but somehow it makes sense in the world he’s created.
Part Gallic rom-com and part meditation on grief, “The Electric Kiss” slips and slides and provides a slight way to begin the film festival, but not an unpleasant one. As usual, Cannes kicked off with an appetizer; the main courses will follow.
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