Pierre Salvadori opens the 79th Cannes Film Festival this evening with Roaring Twenties Paris art world-set romantic tragicomedy The Electric Kiss starring Pio Marmaï, Anaïs Demoustier, Vimala Pons and Gilles Lellouche.
Taking time out of the mixing room to talk to Deadline just days before the premiere, the French director admits to feeling a mixture of elation and terror as he gears up for his first time in Official Selection across a 30-year career.
“It’s funny because there was talk of the film being in competition but for me, it isn’t a competition film and I didn’t want to be in competition,” says Salvadori.
He suggests other works in his filmography – such as The Apprentices (1995), with Marie Trintignant, François Cluzet and Guillaume Depardieu; or the Berlinale-selected In The Courtyard starring Catherine Deneuve (2014) and The Trouble With You (En Liberté!), which screened in Directors’ Fortnight in 2018 – would have been better suited as Palme d’Or contenders.
“This is a film for a party, a celebration… it’s a film that talks about my love for cinema… we said we wanted the opening slot but had no idea if it would happen… so to be presenting the film in that immense theater is a gift, something that has not happened to me across the 30 years of my career… it’s a joy accompanied by an immense terror and fear, that will only come to an end at 10.30pm,” he says.
Set in Roaring Twenties Paris, or Les Années Folles, as the city emerges as a major modern art market, The Electric Kiss weaves a bittersweet tale of love and betrayal and finding love in unexpected places.
Demoustier stars as a penniless young woman called Suzanne working on the ‘Venus Electrificata’ sideshow of a traveling fair meting out electrifying kisses to unsuspecting paying bystanders, while secretly being charged with electricity.
Taking her cue from the fayre’s resident clairvoyant, Suzanne hits on a moneymaking scheme in which she convinces grieving artist Antoine (Marmaï) that she has psychic powers and is capable of connecting him with dead wife Irène (Pons). Her ruse wins the approval of his art dealer and friend Armand (Lellouche) who is desperate to get his most lucrative artist back at work.
Occasional actor Salvadori recounts how the film’s premise grew out of a backstory given to him by director Rebecca Zlotowski for his character in her 2019 film The Summoning (Planetarium), starring Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp.
“I was playing a director shooting a film in 1938, before the war. In the screenplay the description for the film I was directing was very vague… Rebecca kept asking me to improvise scenes where I was directing on set. At a certain point, she said, ‘Pierre, if that can help you, I can give you some background on the screenplay for the film your directing,” recalls Salvadori.
“She told me it was the story of a young woman, a fake psychic, who makes a young man believe she can put him in contact with his deceased wife, and in the process falls in love with him.”
Salvadori immediately fell in love with the storyline, which stayed in the back of his mind, with the director then deciding to revive the idea after his penultimate film The Trouble With You. In between times, he has also directed episodes of the French version of In Therapy as well as the children’s adventure tale The Little Gang.
“I loved the paradox of someone manipulating someone but at the same time falling in love with that person as they steal from them,” he says, suggesting the plot has hints of Trouble in Paradise, the 1932 classic by Ernst Lubitsch.
Zlotowski did not want payment for the idea, but Salvadori has put her and The Summoning co-writer Robin Campillo in the credits. “Rebecca said, ‘Ideas belong to those who take them on’,” he recounts.
The decision to set The Electric Kiss in 1928 is tied to the craze for Spiritualism in Europe and the U.S. at that time, when the belief that it was possible to connect with the people in the afterlife sparked a vogue for seances and other psychic experiences.
“It needed to be set in that era, otherwise my character would come across as too gullible, almost naive, bordering on stupid,” he says. “There was a great deal of curiosity about everything related to the afterlife and spiritualism at that time. It was considered intelligent and open-minded to be interested in those things.”
He points to the fact that figures such as Thomas Edison even embraced the craze, with the electric power-pioneer inventing a machine to speak to people in the afterlife.
The Electric Kiss is Salvadori’s 10th theatrical feature in a filmography dominated by comedies and romantic comedies. He winces on being read a French media resumé of his work as being characterised by “the search for happiness” and “broad audience appeal”.
“It almost hurts,” he says, suggesting there’s a tendency to regard comedies as a “cynical” ploy to appeal to as wide as audience as possible,
The director says his filmmaking is steeped in a love of strong mise-en-scene and a desire to explore the dynamics of human relationships, with the happy outcome element of the story never its main driver.
“I liked going to the movies as a kid, but I didn’t love cinema…. the first filmmaker who liberated me and broadened my horizons was Lubitsch. It was after seeing Heaven Can Wait that I suddenly understood what directing was, what it was all about,” he explains.
“I understood that ultimately, it was the formalists who interested me, as well fiction and the mise-en-scène, and how fundamentally the same story filmed by someone else, would have been a different film.
“initially, the first filmmakers who fascinated me starting with Lubitsch, were Howard Hawks, Mitchell Leisen, Gregory La Cava, filmmakers who have a very powerful, very assertive, very strong style, who use all the tools of cinema, and very often are also genre filmmakers, because then there’s [Raoul] Walsh, people,” he continues, referring to the The Big Trail (1930), The Roaring Twenties (1939), High Sierra (1941) director.
“Directors who work with genre, but with a very strong point of view. That’s what interests me enormously. I’m not at all a naturalist filmmaker or a filmmaker obsessed with any form of realism. But fiction interests me, and the way it’s shaped interests me.”
“I don’t like films with a strong message. I like it when there is a fictional narrative, and the friction between the characters stirs things up and themes come to the surface. I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to make a film about the relationship between art and money,’ or ‘I’m going to make a film about self-interest,’ but these are things that surface in film through the somewhat complex, interesting characters.”
The Electric Kiss reunites Salvadori with Marmaï, after collaborations on In The Courtyard and The Trouble with You, and marks his first time working with Demoustier.
“I met Anaïs on a jury and we had quite a few conversations about cinema. I was struck by her quickness, her intelligence, her mischievousness. There was something about her that I really liked,” he says.
“At the same time, I knew she was a very technically skilled as actress, capable of both control and abandon. The dialogue is very scripted, and I needed someone who could bring that to life, with a certain rhythm and musicality. When I made In the Courtyard with Catherine Deneuve, Catherine was also very musical, like Anaïs. They have a certain expressiveness, a certain way of breaking the silence.”
The feature also reunites Salvadori with producer Philippe Martin with the director revealing that Lellouche’s character of art dealer Armand is inspired his long-time collaborator, and their producer-director dynamic over 30 years of working together.
The pair first met in their early 20s, just as Martin was on the cusp of getting his company Les Films Pelléas off the ground.
“I had written my first film, Wild Target… He said to me, ‘I’m going to become a producer, and then I’ll produce your film’. I was like sure, thanks, goodbye. I was working in the theater at the time. Philippe never had any money. I was always withdrawing money for him. I was like, how is this guy going to be my producer?. ”
Martin did manage to set up his own company and came back to Salvadori, producing his first short Ménage and Wild Target.
“He’s the one who told me I had to direct the film. At the time, I wanted to act in it,” says Salvadori.
He laughs, that like Armand with Antoine in The Electric Kiss, Martin is at once looking out for him and keen for him to keep the screenplays and features coming in
“There has always been this dimension of friendship and work, and sometimes a lot of tension about how to produce a film and to succeed in making it; a lot of arguments about what a film should be. There’s this unbreakable friendship, almost a brotherhood, and then this other dimension of our relationship around making a film work together, which can be very chaotic and difficult.”
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