‘Leave One Day’ review: Cannes opens with crowd-pleasing musical of ‘exceptionally Gallic’ flavour

Dir: Amélie Bonnin. France. 2025. 96 mins.

Nudging into her early forties, Cécile (Juliette Armanet) is about to embark on a new chapter in her life. A former winner on a TV cooking show, she is days away from opening her own restaurant in Paris. Soon, though, she’ll discover she is pregnant, and her father (François Rollin) becomes ill. Returning home to rural Grand Est in northeastern France, Cécile reconnects with her teenage almost-sweetheart, Raphaël (Bastien Bouillon). Her wistful reminiscence for the past is echoed in the film’s use of musical numbers – the cast sporadically launches into versions of well-seasoned French pop classics. Amélie Bonnin’s Cannes opener – the first debut film ever to play in the festival opening slot – is a crowd-pleaser with an exceptionally Gallic flavour (a flavour that non-Francophone or Francophile audiences might find a little overpowering). 

A film with a hearty appetite for nostalgia

Leave One Day shares a title and a basic theme with Bonnin’s César-winning 2021 debut short film. It also, in Bouillon and singer-songwriter Armanet, boasts the same key cast members. Here, however, the roles are reversed: in the short film, it was the male character who returns to the small town of his youth and reconnects with the girl he left behind. Switching the gender roles in the feature version was an astute decision: it makes for a meatier dramatic arc, since Cécile’s situation is complicated by her body clock. A testy father-daughter relationship adds weight to the story, all of which Armanet, in her first lead role, tackles with a convincingly frayed and frustrated performance.

The musical numbers, performed with an unpolished gusto, are more hit-and-miss in their appeal. Sing-along ballads and pop stompers, first performed by artists such as Dalida and Claude Nougaro in the 60s and 70s, and more recent tracks such as the title song, ’Partir Un Jour’, by the late 90s boy band 2be3 – it’s all music specifically chosen to strike a chord with French audiences. These are not, however, songs which are likely to have the same nostalgic pull for punters outside of France. Similarly, this is a picture that is likely to play far more successfully domestically than in other territories.

What Bonnin captures particularly well is the working-class rural milieu in which Cécile grew up. There’s a distant kinship with Louise Courvoisier’s breakout hit Holy Cow in the unsentimental and earthy depiction of French countryside communities, worlds which seem to be powered by alcohol, petrol fumes and sporadic outbreaks of violence.

Raphaël, now a mechanic with his own garage, is in many ways still the same feckless teenager that Cécile once knew. His responsibilities have expanded but his leisure activities still mainly involve pulling wheelies on dirt bikes and drinking in car parks. And that, together with the enduring question of what might have been, is part of his appeal. With a business to run, a menu to plan and an unwanted pregnancy to deal with, an uncomplicated, floppy-haired charmer with an impish grin represents a temporary respite from the burdens that Cécile has shouldered in her high-pressure life in Paris.

Less comfortable is her relationship with the kitchen in which she grew up. Her highfalutin haute cuisine is a world away from the solid peasant fare her father serves at his truk stop cafe – something that she made clear in a series of sniffy comments during her stint on the TV show. Her abrasive, stubborn father kept a written record of her every attack on his traditional style of French cuisine, taking particular umbrage over her criticism of the macédoine salad. Not entirely unexpectedly, Céline’s search for a signature dish is ultimately inspired by the food she shared with her dad in the past. This is, after all, a film with a hearty appetite for nostalgia.