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 dead person disconcerting the conspiracists by actually speaking through this bogus medium. In fact, this movie is not unlike Cédric Klapisch’s Colours of Time from last year’s Cannes, though with more strained comedy and farce.
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