THE ELECTRIC KISS Review

We are in Cannes. We have walked the Croisette, felt the particular electricity of a festival that has been doing this longer than any of us have been alive, and sat down in the dark for the first film of the year's most anticipated two weeks. The opening night slot at Cannes carries a specific kind of weight. It is not always given to the best film in the program but it is always given to a film that is meant to set the tone, to announce what kind of festival this is going to be, to send several thousand critics and industry figures out into the warm Mediterranean night with something to talk about. The Electric Kiss gives us plenty to talk about. Not all of it good.

Pierre Salvadori's period comedy is set in 1920, just beyond the respectable edges of Paris, in a traveling carnival where a young woman named Suzanne earns her living delivering mild electric shocks to customers willing to pay for a kiss. She wants out, The premise fizzes with potential, and in its best early stretch, the film delivers it. When Suzanne falls into an unlikely scheme with a slick gallerist played by Gilles Lellouche, conning a grief-stricken painter by posing as his late wife's medium, the film finds a register that feels genuinely alive.

Lellouche and Anaïs Demoustier are two of the most watchable faces in contemporary French cinema, and Salvadori is smart enough to let the camera linger on them in close-up, cutting between two people who are performing and yet, underneath the performances, slowly becoming real to each other. We leaned forward in our seats. We thought: yes. This is why we came to Cannes.

There are several fine films living inside The Electric Kiss. The trouble is that Salavadori invited all of them and none of them quite got along.

And then the film introduces a fourth major character and a second narrative strand, and the air begins to leave the room. The late wife's diaries pull the story into extended flashback, and with five credited writers pulling in different directions, the tone becomes impossible to pin down. Someone wanted a dark edge to Suzanne's backstory. Someone else insisted on sunlit meadow sequences. Both got their way. At 122 minutes the film runs at least twenty too long. The brisk pace that screwball comedy depends on slowly bleeds out across an increasingly unfocused second half.

Demoustier remains magnetic throughout and the 1920s production design is genuinely lovely. There are details here worth feasting on, moments where the film remembers what it could have been and briefly becomes it. But charm cannot carry a film that cannot decide what it wants to be, and by the time The Electric Kiss reaches its conclusion we have lost the thread of what made it sparkle in the first place.

Cannes 2026 has begun. The Croisette is warm, the rosé is cold, and the first film of the festival has left us with a pleasant but restless feeling. We are already looking forward to tomorrow.

🍿 SCORE = 52 / 100