As the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival premiered on Tuesday, May 13th, so did its first film: Partir un Jour (Leave One Day). This film follows Cécile Béguin, a young woman who has left her hometown with the hopes of pursuing her dream career in Paris as a chef; however, before the grand opening of her and her boyfriend's restaurant, she receives a call and is forced to return to where she grew up because of a serious family emergency. The cast consists of Juliette Armanet(Cécile Béguin), Tewfik Jallab(Sofiane Garbi, Cécile's boyfriend), Bastien Bouillon(Raphaël Tenreiro, Cécile's hometown friend), Dominique Blanc(Fanfan Béguin, Cécile's mother), and François Rollin(Gérard Béguin, Cécile's father). The director, Amélie Bonnin, made a short film of the same name and an almost parallel plot in 2021 with a runtime of only 25 minutes. However, the main difference between the two films is that Bastien Bouillon played the main character, Julien Beguin, and Juliette Armanet played the role of Caroline for the short film, and both actors swapped roles for the full-length film. Even more interesting is that François Rollin's character in the short film shares the same name in both films, but instead of being Cécile's father, he was Julien's father in the original. 

I had the privilege of seeing Partir un Jour on its opening night, and I left the theater with many questions. I'm not sure if this was common knowledge, but going into the film, I had no clue that this was a musical... and a jukebox musical at that. For those who don't know, a jukebox musical is practically the same as a normal musical; instead of using new songs created for the project, jukebox musicals use pre-existing songs chosen due to their connection to the plot or characters. However, this film was more than just an ordinary jukebox musical since every well-known song has new lyrics that have been rewritten to connect the plot or the characters, like a parody. Overall, this aspect didn't work for me; although at some points the songs were catchy and the words were clever, it was weighed down by the fact that all of the songs had already been previously made and were overshadowed by their predecessors.

When it comes to my review of the plot, let me say that I am not the only opinion; I'm sure there are going to be plenty of others who disagree with me, and that's normal. 

The plot, although solid, isn't much that hasn't been seen before. There will always be clichés in cinema, but when everything seems pretty played out, it just becomes a little boring. This is not to say that this movie was bad; I just felt like there wasn't much in it that was new or original, other than the parody-like jukebox musical idea, which wasn't executed well, in my opinion. When you build a story around tropes, of course, the film is going to be fine because tropes become the way they do when a certain aspect or storyline of a film continually succeeds; however, that is when you end up with a played-out product that is just fine. This is one of those movies where it's not bad enough where I'd question your judgment if you loved it, but it's also not good enough where, if you hated it, I wouldn't want to ever talk to you about movies again. All in all, I would say that Partir un Jour(Leave one day) isn't the worst thing I have ever seen or the most boring; however, I am a bit confused about how a movie like this got its way into the film festival.