Critic's Notebook

Guy Ferrandis

Pierre Salvadori’s “La Vénus électrique” may be the most exhilarating Cannes opener in recent memory: a wholly original, exquisitely engineered period romantic comedy whose emotional buoyancy never comes at the expense of formal rigor. Though screening outside competition, the film possesses the assurance and tonal sophistication of a major contender. It recalls the kind of unabashedly romantic popular cinema that contemporary filmmakers rarely attempt anymore, much less pull off with this degree of elegance.

Set in Paris in 1928, the story centers on Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier), an exploited circus performer sold by her father as a teenager to a grotesque impresario named Titus (Gustave Kervern). Billed as “Venus electrificata,” Suzanne serves as the centerpiece of a freak show in which spectators pay to receive the jolts of love by kissing her while Titus secretly administers electric shocks backstage. Mr. Salvadori introduces this premise with the matter-of-fact whimsy characteristic of classic French farce, but beneath the comic absurdity lies an unmistakable melancholy: Suzanne’s entire existence has been organized around performance, coercion and illusion.

One evening, while waiting for a chance to sneak into her colleague Claudia’s (Caroline Gay) trailer to steal food, Suzanne witnesses Claudia conducting a fraudulent séance for a paying client. Later that night, Suzanne herself is cornered by the drunken Antoine (Pio Marmaï), a painter desperate to contact the spirit of his deceased lover, Irène (Vimala Pons). Waving 10 francs in front of her, Antoine persuades Suzanne to improvise a séance on the spot. What begins as a petty deception gradually develops into something stranger and more emotionally precarious.

At Antoine’s insistence, Suzanne continues the charade at his home, where she attracts the suspicion of Armand (Gilles Lellouche), Antoine’s art dealer and confidant. Initially, Armand treats her as an opportunistic fraud and orders her out of Antoine’s life. Yet when he notices Antoine finally returning to his canvases after a prolonged artistic paralysis, pragmatism overrides indignation. Armand tracks Suzanne down and cajoles her to continue impersonating a medium. Mr. Salvadori mines the arrangement for comedy without ever reducing the characters to comic machinery; each deception deepens their emotional dependency.

The film takes its most audacious turn when Suzanne, rifling through Antoine’s apartment, discovers Irène’s diaries hidden inside a dressing table. From there, Mr. Salvadori begins to braid together two timelines: Antoine’s romance with Irène and his evolving relationship with Suzanne nearly a decade later. Extended flashbacks often function as narrative dead weight, flattening momentum under the guise of psychological depth. Here, however, Mr. Salvadori deploys them with unusual dexterity, less as explanatory interruptions than as contrapuntal echoes. The structure occasionally recalls “The Godfather Part II” in the way one love story refracts another across time. Particularly remarkable is a transition that moves seamlessly from a restaurant scene featuring Antoine, Armand and Irène to a parallel gathering years later with Suzanne and her roommate, Camille (Madeleine Baudot), the emotional continuity between the two moments arriving almost subliminally.

The broad trajectory of the plot reveals itself early enough. Antoine’s dependence on illusion cannot endure indefinitely, and the film steadily advances toward the moment when he discovers that the séances are fraudulent. Yet Mr. Salvadori handles the inevitability with extraordinary delicacy. What could have collapsed into contrivance instead unfolds with a kind of melancholic grace, preserving the emotional truth of the relationships even as the fabrications unravel. The ending feels at once inevitable and improbably tender.

Written by Benjamin Charbit, Benoît Graffin and Mr. Salvadori, from an original idea by Rebecca Zlotowski and Robin Campillo, the screenplay achieves an uncommon balance between precision and airiness. Its elliptical construction never feels self-conscious; revelations emerge naturally, with the light touch of a filmmaker secure enough not to overexplain. The period detail is equally rich without lapsing into museum-piece fetishism. Even the film’s seemingly anachronistic touches — I found myself briefly doubting the existence of contact lenses in 1928 — prove historically grounded. Camille Bazbaz’s buoyant score, meanwhile, subtly evokes the fairground music of the era, reinforcing the film’s atmosphere of theatrical enchantment tinged with sadness.

What lingers most, though, is the rarity of the experience itself. Romantic comedies today are often either cynically self-aware or emotionally inert, embarrassed by their own sincerity. “La Vénus électrique” embraces the old-fashioned pleasures of coincidence, yearning and emotional transformation without irony, yet with enough formal intelligence to make those pleasures feel newly alive. I genuinely cannot remember the last time I saw a romantic comedy this good.