Amélie Bonnin serves up a charming Cannes opener with Leave One Day.
French pop star Juliette Armanet belts out club bangers in a greasy spoon and somehow it works. That might be the most succinct summation of Partir Un Jour (Leave One Day), the genre-blending, tone-juggling, deep-fried musical dramedy that opened Cannes 2025. Another might be that it’s the classic Hallmark Christmas Movie formula: a successful woman is obliged to return to her sleepy hometown for family reasons, only to rediscover her roots and rekindle a romance with her smouldering small-town ex – all it’s missing is a snowstorm and a pumpkin spice-scented epiphany. Director Amélie Bonnin, making her feature debut, doesn’t so much reinvent the musical as she does reinterpet the recipe, serving it with a ladle of demi-glace and a jukebox jus français on the side.
Cécile (Armanet), a celebrated Top Chef winner poised to open a swanky new Parisian eatery with her reality-show boyfriend Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab), is yanked back to her provincial hometown when her father keels over with another heart attack (he’s had a few). Bonnin assembles some familiar elements: the just-about-making-ends-meet family truck stop diner, the warm, wise and mischeviously gnomic mum Fanfan (Dominique Blanc, nearly stealing the whole film out from under the rest of her cast mates), the curmudgeonly dad (François Rollin) whose heart may be weak but whose capacity for passive-aggressive note taking is in rude health. Naturally, there’s also the complication of the former flame Raphaël (Bastien Bouillon), whose simple mechanic’s life and lure of the path not taken prove tantalising as the stresses pile up on Cécile.
Bonnin’s script (co-written with Dimitri Lucas, expanding on her own César-winning short) doesn’t waste time pretending it’s going to surprise you with plot twists – although it does retain a certain gallic pragmatism in the face of romantic convention. This is homecoming cinema as comfort food – rich with regret, overcooked dreams, and lightly reheated reconciliation. But it’s the genre seasoning that gives Leave One Day its distinct if not always digestible flavour: pop songs erupt mid-conversation, dance numbers sneak into county fairs, and there’s a gloriously daft karaoke-rap routine on an ice rink that turns a tentative rekindling into something halfway transcendent.
There’s no attempt to make the numbers narratively justified. People sing because they do, not because they’ve been metaphorically pushed to the emotional brink and outside of the sporadic chant spontané, there’s an almost cinéma vérité approach to the ambient sound. Background noise is unfiltered and uncurated, with little to no score to bridge the gaps between outbreaks of crooning. It’s less The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and more Spotify Playlist: Small Town French Edition (shuffle). Bonnin borrows from the Alain Resnais Same Old Song playbook, using familiar French pop tunes – Claude François, Michel Delpech, Stromae – to amplify the emotion while tweaking the lyrics as needed. The result is less musical theatre, more musical serendipity.
Armanet performs with the confidence of someone used to commanding a stage, which helps to smoothe out the rougher edges of her dramatic range. She’s most compelling when the script doesn’t ask her to act too much – just sing, simmer, and side-eye her way through familial expectations and romantic second chances. Bouillon, by contrast, anchors his role with the kind of laid-back melancholy that makes him feel like the one who never left because he was already exactly where he wanted to be, even if he’s not being entirely honest about what keeps him in their small town. Their chemistry peaks during that skating rink scene – yes, to Femme Like U – which, on paper, should be unbearably naff but ends up being the film’s most sincere emotional beat through the skill and artistry of the cast and crew.
The Loir-et-Cher setting adds a grubby realism that tries (and mostly succeeds) to keep things from floating away into whimsy. It’s a world of graisse à frites and resentment, shot through with sudden song – more grease stains than Grease and kilometres away from the frothy West End or Broadway fantasy that French culture has no real equivalent to. Bonnin takes care never to lean too hard into the melodrama, which is both a strength and a limitation, as is the decision to leave the ending to various plot threads implied rather than explicit. What emerges is a sweet film that’s easy to enjoy in the moment, with a sugar-crash of an ending that leaves you vaguely peckish for something more substantial.
Leave One Day likely won’t earn a place at the genre’s top table, certainly not outside its native cuisine, but it knows how to put on a serviceable spread. It’s warm, familiar, occasionally flat, sometimes fizzy. And like any decent roadside meal, it’s probably best enjoyed when you weren’t really planning to stop in the first place.
