This year\u2019s Cannes menu begins with something left over from the sweet trolley: a gooey, glutinous and slightly flat confection, a comedy about art for which not everyone has the palette or the palate. A fake spiritualist at the time of France\u2019s picturesque belle \u00e9poque pretends she is in contact with the dead lover of a grieving and creatively blocked artist \u2013 but she has been secretly put up to it by the painter\u2019s wily agent, convinced that his client\u2019s ecstatic contact with this amour from beyond the grave will inspire him to recommence the production of hugely expensive paintings.<\/p>\n
The film is directed and co-written by Pierre Salvadori and the result is something like a moderate mid-period Woody Allen or No\u00ebl Coward\u2019s Blithe Spirit \u2013 though Allen and Coward would surely have followed the obvious narrative possibility of the dead person disconcerting the conspiracists by actually speaking through this bogus medium. In fact, this movie is not unlike C\u00e9dric Klapisch\u2019s Colours of Time<\/a> from last year\u2019s Cannes, though with more strained comedy and farce.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Ana\u00efs Demoustier plays Suzanne, a young woman in a travelling circus, newly arrived in Paris, who in her saucy, spangly outfit on stage is the Electric Venus; as her hands float over two crackling Van de Graaff generator-type globes, she will kiss young men from the crowd for 30 centimes a time while the electricity of true love fizzes through their lips. As the barker announces: \u201cIt is not an idea or a metaphor; it is pure sensation!\u201d While Suzanne is in the spiritualist\u2019s tent, grief-stricken artist Antoine (Pio Marma\u00ef) appears, demanding access to his deceased lover, Ir\u00e8ne, a woman whose death he blames on himself, having cheated on her.<\/p>\n Suzanne bluffs her way through a phoney seance and soon \u2013 at the cynical instigation of cunning gallerist Armand (Gilles Lellouche) \u2013 she is calling round at his sumptuous home, sneakily using contact lenses to fake her visionary-blind connection with the Great Beyond, and furtively looking through Ir\u00e8ne\u2019s diaries for plausible-sounding detail. But just as Antoine\u2019s creativity is reignited, Suzanne realises (of course) that she is falling in love with him.<\/p>\n The cantering momentum of this film is rather stymied by lengthy flashbacks which show us Ir\u00e8ne herself, played by Vimala Pons; she is no mere simpering muse but a shrewdly educated lover of art whose emotional life is more unexpected than we thought. These flashbacks are there to disclose secrets which counterbalance the comic imposture of Armand and Suzanne, but they work slightly more smoothly in shorter bursts, once the longer and more cumbersome expositional flashback is out of the way. But the film\u2019s absurdity and antique dramatic style never quite come to life.<\/p>\n