According to tradition, the 79e edition of the Cannes Film Festival (May 12 to 23, 2026) opened in two stages, with a ceremony hosted for the occasion by actress Eye Haïdara, then the film The Electric Venusby Pierre Salvadori.
The mistress of ceremonies had nothing in particular to say, other than that she really likes cinema. The highlight of his performance was devoted to the presentation of an honorary Palme d’Or to someone who never had his place at Cannes and who did not fail to mention it, Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director of the trilogy of Lord of the Rings.
Two somewhat singular moments nevertheless marked this ritual without much relief, as often but not always – we remember Juliette Binoche evoking the situation in the Gaza Strip during the opening in 2025.
The first moment was this unprecedented situation where the president of the jury of the official competition, Park Chan-wook, made his speech entirely in Korean. Apart from the Korean speakers, no one understood anything, but at least a feeling of the not immediately transparent diversity of reality and a breeze of neither deja-vu nor deja-heard then passed into the Grand Auditorium Louis-Lumière.
Then there was a sort of humor in having the 79 declarede Cannes Festival officially opened by Jane Fonda and Gong Li. Two personalities representative of the two great cinematographic powers that are Hollywood and China, whose absence is one of the notable aspects of the 2026 edition.
Echoing the British juror Paul Laverty (the screenwriter of Ken Loach), who had, during the press conference, paid tribute to the Hollywood stars who protested against the genocide of the Palestinians, Jane Fonda tried to instill a little critical spirit towards the state of the world in a brief harangue, sympathetic but vague, which was politely applauded. End of the first act, time for the opening film.
“The Electric Venus”, by Pierre Salvadori
Two distinct questions arise simultaneously. The Electric Venus is it a good movie? The Electric Venus is it a good film to open the Cannes Film Festival?
The answer to the second question is simple: yes. Pierre Salvadori’s eleventh feature film is both a well-shot romantic comedy, a product likely to appeal to an international audience fond of vintage Parisian postcards, a light play with questions of spectacle, the relationship to representation, and the opportunity for numbers from actors and actresses.
Let us add that it has the merit of announcing the dominant color of this edition, where French productions occupy an overwhelming position. But the answer to the first question is less obvious. Let’s say that The Electric Venuswhich was released in French cinemas on the day of its presentation in Cannes, is a skillfully crafted proposition.
Antoine (Pio Marmaï), a successful painter and inconsolable young widower, lets himself be convinced by the pseudo-medium Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier) that she is allowing him to get in touch with his intensely missed Irène (Vimala Pons). This manipulation benefits the penniless fairground as well as the gallery owner and nevertheless friend of the painter, Armand (Gilles Lellouche).
The establishment of this vaudeville quartet opens the door to an arsenal of misunderstandings, romantic slip-ups, flashbacks and sparks that good screenwriting software would inevitably produce.
Two attractive settings of Paris in the 1920s – the miserable fortifications and a beautiful Art Deco style house – and two proven folklores – the painters of the Montparnasse era and that of the funfair – offer visual resources electrified by the signs of modernity in full advent.
This modernity is on the technical side (the so-called amorous sparks produced by a device created around Suzanne’s body on stage), not at all on the artistic side. Antoine is a popular painter who is certainly not a disturbing person. At the time of the Surrealists, of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the midst of a revolution in pictorial art, we see the signal.
There is suffering in the show to which Suzanne is forced (she really takes the juice) and trouble in the relationship between Antoine and Armand, or even the shadow of a critical comment on the use of naked bodies as models – with the happiest idea of the film: that it is Irène who first discovers Antoine’s buttocks exhibited to a squad of rapists.
Above all, particularly in the use of decorations and accessories, there is an antique patina which helps to define where this Electric Venus: of a legacy forever established as an untouchable monument of French cinema, Children of Paradiseby Marcel Carné (1945). There we find his carefully crafted replicas, his double bottom romances and his variations on the truth and the images which seem to ask questions when they know in advance the answers, sentimental and of a conventional romanticism.
The performance of the performers is to match, a display of risk-free virtuosity which is not surprising in the two male performers, disappointing on the part of Anaïs Demoustier who we experienced more unexpectedly. Only Vimala Pons, as always, introduces a little strangeness into the seduction of her Irene.
Made to please, The Electric Venus will please. So much the better for Pierre Salvadori and his troupe. But this film, which could have been written and shot in 1950, definitely doesn’t say anything very stimulating, either about cinema or about the spirit of the times.
