Love is like magic and life is like a show.
In French film director Pierre Salvadori's The Electric Kiss (La Vénus Électrique), which opened the 79th Cannes Film Festival, the promise of romance transforms into an electric channelling experience and reality is torn into performances and imaginations.
Co-written with Benjamin Charbit and Benoît Graffin, the film opens in a whimsical and carnivalesque circus arena in 1920s Paris. Among them, there's a gimmick performance called "Vénus Électrifica" that seeks the viewers' attention.
Dressed in a flamboyant outfit and wearing a chic wig, Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier) is a servant to an exploited boss who only tries to make money out of her labour. When a customer comes to the stage and kisses her lips, she puts her hands on two transmissive iron balls in order for electricity to shoot through her body, creating a jolting, if fleeting, experience.
Such a manoeuvre, with its performative potential, soon becomes a sleight-of-hand that traps a promising artist, Antoine Balestro (Pio Marmaï).
Now in despair, he has just lost his beloved wife Irène and is too lost in grief to paint anymore. Drunk and inconsolable, Antoine asks for a séance with the dead, which turns out to be a transformative phenomenon for the painter.
What Antoine doesn't know, however, is that the scheme was orchestrated by Armand (Gilles Lelouche), a predatory art dealer harbouring ulterior secrets. He promised Suzanne a great deal of money if she could make Antoine resume his work, so that Armand's art gallery can remain profitable.
With Antoine's increasing desire to see the spirit of Irène again, Suzzane presents herself as a real spiritualist, emanating from her convincingly theatrical performance. Teasing and floaty as it may seem, Antione's frenzy for Irène gradually threads a love story built from scratch between the couple.
To prove that she is the materialized Irène, Suzzane uses what she has learned about the dead woman's relationship with Antoine, making her presence more and more indispensable to the grieving widower. As Suzzane disguises herself more and more as the resurrected Irène, however, she also feels the compression of her own agency.
The more otherness she embeds, the less subjectivity she finds in herself. Such interchangeability confuses her, resembling an unstable state when revelation arrives.
Director Salvadori plays with the concept of agency, which is manifested in both the electricity conduit and the spirit possession. The miraculous ending further adds a supernatural layer to the drama, parodying how the shock brought by defibrillation can be a means to resurrect the dead that complete the fantasy show.
Demoustier shows great balance between emotional seriousness and ostensible mischievousness, rendering the character a funny yet sympathetic figure asking to be truly gazed upon. She switches between the masqueraded character and her concealed self, capturing Suzanne's complexities in her search for real love and care.
At its core, The Electric Kiss is a Gallic rom-com that invites drama and twisted turns when depicting the relationship between two people. Its creative storytelling and imaginative characterisation -- amplified by a magic-show-like atmosphere -- engage the narrative in a more mesmerising and attractive manner.
The film enjoyed its world premiere out of competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Visit the film's page at the official site for more information.