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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Donald Sutherland was an irreplaceable aristocrat of cinema

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The late actor was a commanding and versatile presence on the big screen, perfecting everything from villainy to sensuality in films such as Don’t Look Now and Klute

Donald Sutherland was an utterly unique actor and irreplacable star: possessed of a distinctive leonine handsomeness that the white beard of his latter years only made more majestic: watchful, cerebral, charismatic, with a refinement to his screen acting technique comparable perhaps only to Paul Scofield and his Canadian background (together with his early stage training and experience in England and Scotland) gave his American roles a certain touch of Anglo-international class. Sutherland was commanding and exacting, he gave each of his roles and films something special: he addressed his co-stars and the camera itself from a position of strength.

Even playing a weak or absurd character, as he did starring as the preposterous womaniser in Federico Fellini’s Casanova in 1976, finally reduced to the job of a librarian in a German count’s castle, brooding grotesquely over the phantoms of past lovers, Sutherland was still strong, still mesmeric, his intelligent face still sympathetic as Casanova, even though resembling a non-priapic gargoyle. For Bertolucci in his Italian epic 1900, he played an actual fascist, the gruesomely named Attila, and though certainly very far from sympathetic, he played the role with a sickeningly twinkle-eyed dynamism.

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