THE STORY – A rising chef must return to her hometown after her father suffers a heart attack and gets reunited with her teenage crush.
THE CAST – Juliette Armanet, Bastien Bouillon, Dominique Blanc, Tewfik Jallab & François Rollin
THE TEAM – Amélie Bonnin (Director/Writer) & Dimitri Lucas (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 94 Minutes
Pop music is something of a universal language. Not so much in the way that you can always understand pop music even if you don’t understand the lyrics, but in the way that they express feelings that we all have better than we ever could. Angry after seeing your ex with another girl? Turn on “You Oughta Know” and sing along for catharsis. Want to make a move but feeling too shy? Play “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” for them, and the job’s done. They may be as simplistic as poetry, but great pop songs capture universal emotions and play them back to us over a pulsing beat and a catchy melody, becoming so closely associated with certain feelings that they speak for us when we can’t find the words ourselves. Amélie Bonnin’s debut feature “Leave One Day,” the Opening Night selection of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, understands the power of great pop songs better than any musical since “Moulin Rouge!.” Although its style is far more down-to-earth than Baz Luhrmann’s rococo fantasia and thus can’t match that film’s dizzying highs, “Leave One Day” has a low-key charm all its own.
Cécile (Juliette Armanet), a recent “Top Chef” winner, is trying to open a new restaurant in Paris but can’t find a signature dish for people to repost on Instagram. When her mother (Dominique Blanc) tells her that her father (François Rollin) has had yet another heart attack and refused a hospital stay, she travels back home to her family’s truck stop diner to check in and talk some sense into him. It’s a nice distraction from both the restaurant and the fact that she’s pregnant with a child that she doesn’t want, fathered by her sous-chef, Sofinae (Tewfik Jallab). While staying with Mom and Dad, she runs into her old high school friend Raphaël (Bastien Bouillon), and sparks begin to fly. The longer she stays, the less it seems she wants to go back to Paris, but can she really just up and leave one day?
The love triangle at the film’s center is basic stuff, but the musical elements give it some much-needed oomph. Bonnin turns “Ces Soirées-là” into a pissing contest between Raphaël and Sofiane that turns into a bar fight and follows it up with another duet as a prelude to a breathtaking kiss. Characters in musicals sing when their emotions become so strong that it’s not enough to simply speak, and Bonnin’s main conceit for this film is that the characters sing whenever they find themselves unable to put their feelings into words. The film plays fast and loose with the music being diegetic; the first time anyone breaks into song is when Sofiane tries to calm down Cécile by singing “Alors on danse,” which starts a cappella and slowly adds non-diegetic instrumentation, like plenty of non-musicals do on a regular basis. From then on, sometimes the characters are aware that they’re singing to each other (mother and daughter having a bitch session about papa’s stubbornness), and other times the singing is more clearly a fantasy (when Raphaël and Cécile see each other for the first time). It doesn’t break the film, but if you’re already on the fence about people randomly bursting into song in a fictional work of art, this quality of the musical numbers certainly won’t help your enjoyment of the film.
Nor will the singing voices of the ensemble, which range from underwhelming (but sweet) to outright bad (but passionate). Thankfully, they’re all good enough actors that they can cover for their lack of professionally trained voices with deep emotion, and it mostly works. The performers share a familial rapport that makes the film easy to watch, grounding it in warm feelings even when the characters grow cold towards each other. Armanet strikes a perfect balance as Cécile between her humble upbringing and her haute cuisine snobbery. She bristles every time someone mentions “Top Chef,” almost as if she wishes she had never done it, and she helps with everything in her parents’ restaurant with a complete lack of ego. She has great chemistry with both Bouillon and Jallab, making sure to delineate what Cécile is attracted to in each of them. Bouillon’s laidback ease and Jallab’s passionate intensity make perfect foils for each other, and both men are full of charisma. Bouillon is especially great, letting a deeper sadness peek through key moments that add rich complexity to the character.
The standard romance and familial drama beats of Bonnin’s screenplay, co-written with Dimitri Lucas, can feel thin at times. Thankfully, the strong performances and all-around good vibes make “Leave One Day” an easy watch. The karaoke-like musical performances end up adding to the film’s charm more than they detract from it, drawing the audience closer to the characters as they guilelessly use the universal language of pop music to express their deepest feelings. Bonnin has made a nearly perfect pop song of a film: It doesn’t exactly scale great artistic heights, but it will speak to anyone who has ever found themselves unable to say what they wanted to say.
