This year’s 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’s picturesque belle époque pretends she is in contact with the dead lover of a grieving and creatively blocked artist – but she has been secretly put up to it by the painter’s wily agent, convinced that his client’s ecstatic contact with this amour from beyond the grave will inspire him to recommence the production of hugely expensive paintings.
The film is directed and co-written by Pierre Salvadori and the result is something like a moderate mid-period Woody Allen or Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit – 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 Cédric Klapisch’s Colours of Time from last year’s Cannes, though with more strained comedy and farce.
Anaïs 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: “It is not an idea or a metaphor; it is pure sensation!” While Suzanne is in the spiritualist’s tent, grief-stricken artist Antoine (Pio Marmaï) appears, demanding access to his deceased lover, Irène, a woman whose death he blames on himself, having cheated on her.
Suzanne bluffs her way through a phoney seance and soon – at the cynical instigation of cunning gallerist Armand (Gilles Lellouche) – 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 Irène’s diaries for plausible-sounding detail. But just as Antoine’s creativity is reignited, Suzanne realises (of course) that she is falling in love with him.
The cantering momentum of this film is rather stymied by lengthy flashbacks which show us Irène 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’s absurdity and antique dramatic style never quite come to life.