The Electric Kiss review – belle époque seance comedy struggles to summon real magic

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Pierre Salvadori’s whimsical period farce about a fake medium and a grief-stricken painter has charm and elegance, but its romantic fantasy never quite ignites 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 ...
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Berlin film festival 2023 roundup – prestige, politics and ethical starpower

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This year’s Berlinale continued the tradition of combining earnestness with red-carpet glamour – featuring Kristen Stewart, Bono and Steven Spielberg, and this time some real crowd pleasers

Berlin may not be as glitzy as the other big European festivals, Cannes and Venice, but it knows how to make the most of what you might call “ethical starpower”. Hence Steven Spielberg, present this year to accept the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, who made an eloquent and imposing speech about longevity, healing and – as befits the locale – the weight of history. And hence serious-minded Hollywood actor Kristen Stewart heading a jury including Iranian-French star Golshifteh Farahani and previous Berlinale-winning directors Carla Simón and Radu Jude – a lineup that seems highly likely to make some daring awards choices.

But there’s also that long-standing Berlinale tradition of combining red-carpet prestige with a certain earnestness that doesn’t always flourish on the screen. A prime example this year was Golda, a solemn, sluggish drama about Israeli premier Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war, with Helen Mirren giving a solid, thoughtful performance, only to be upstaged by her uncanny prosthetic makeup. And then there was Sean Penn’s documentary about Ukraine, Superpower, co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, in which an understandably starstruck encomium to Volodymyr Zelenskiy was overshadowed by much narcissistic hyperventilating about what an amazing thing it was to be Sean Penn caught up in the Whirlwind of History. It was a phenomenally gauche, ill-advised piece; by contrast, Eastern Front, from Ukraine itself, was the real deal, a sober, urgent, profoundly troubling documentary by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, based substantially on the latter’s footage, shot on duty with a volunteer medical crew.

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