– CANNES 2026: The French director discusses his spirited new comedy, as he takes on the period film genre with striking modernity
(© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa – fadege.it, @fadege.it)
With his new film, The Electric Kiss, opening the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Pierre Salvadori returns with a spirited comedy driven by a cascade of misunderstandings, big and small lies giving rise to a flurry of emotional and existential questions. Exhilarating throughout, the film sees the director tackling the period genre for the first time, with striking modernity and impeccable comic timing, carried by a cast perfectly attuned to this stimulating comedy of mistaken identity.
Cineuropa: What do you think lies at the heart of the film?
Pierre Salvadori: I was very keen to explore this paradox: can you love someone, or want to help them, while betraying them at the same time? That’s what fascinates me in cinema; throwing characters driven by complex emotions into situations that are more or less far-fetched, examining both our noble impulses and our more mediocre ones. The original idea came from a film by Rebecca Zlotowski, Planetarium, in which I played a 1930s filmmaker. One day, Rebecca said to me, “If it helps, the film you’re making tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a man she’s conning. She makes him believe she can put him in touch with his dead wife; she becomes the spokesperson for her rival, and the more she brings the dead woman back to life, the more she herself disappears.”
At the centre of the film are betrayals, lies and assumed identities that themselves end up creating fiction?
That initial story idea suggested by Rebecca struck me as brilliant, because you effectively have two characters who end up creating their own fiction. It’s like two tiny atomic nuclei spinning around each other at great speed, producing fiction in the process. What feeds the narrative is not external elements — which is generally what I dislike in cinema — but characters whose obsessions and desires generate the story themselves. They lie to each other, but in order to rise above things, to escape a painful situation, almost out of a vital impulse, rather than for perverse or vain reasons. This lie, which ultimately reveals who they are, becomes the starting point of a fiction.
Between these two fictions orbiting one another — Suzanne pretending to be Antoine’s dead wife, Antoine concealing the feelings he gradually develops for her — another text inserts itself into the narrative: the diary of Irène, Antoine’s late wife. It creates a bridge between different time periods and further enriches the film’s layered structure of embedded stories.
Irène’s diary gradually comes to embody an ideal way of living for Suzanne as she reads it. Irène was someone who liberated and revealed people. She recounted her meeting with Antoine and how she turned him into an artist — she saw the diamond in the rough in him. She was a kind of Pygmalion figure; their relationship went beyond a simple love story. She was a free woman; she becomes a source of inspiration for Suzanne and helps her to emancipate herself. The diary triggers a love story by proxy, through projection. The more Irène fell in love within the pages of the diary, the more Suzanne projects herself into that story.
Was it a particular directing challenge to bring all these different narrative layers to the screen?
Yes, and it was very stimulating! The diary sometimes serves to mark out stages in the action, but at other moments it also tells the story itself. Starting from something highly literary, how do you turn it into cinema? And how do you move from one period to another? For instance, when the past and the present coexist on either side of the same set element. It was also a way of constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a fiction in the process of being constructed. It’s a delicate balance, because the idea was not to slip into irony, second-degree humour or something overly meta.
This is your first “period film”. How did you choose to approach the era?
I approached it with a great deal of anxiety at first! I was afraid it would feel stiff or overly demonstrative. I kept telling the cinematographer that we should never film the sets on their own — there always had to be, in the foreground, a character caught up in a powerful emotion, seized by some inner turmoil, so that the audience’s attention would always remain on them rather than on the sets.
The film’s modernity also comes through in its very strong-willed female characters.
Where you come from as a filmmaker is crucial. My first great cinematic shocks were the films of Lubitsch and Hawks, with women who walk fast, who have powerful desires, an energy that drives the narrative forward. Emancipated, free women. Ever since White Lies, I feel I’ve always filmed determined female characters. Irène embodies the film’s novelistic dimension. She wants to escape her social condition. She senses that this precarious existence is wearing her down and diminishing her. She channels tremendous energy into saving Antoine while also saving herself; there’s an element of self-interest in that too. Suzanne, on the other hand, has no self-esteem. She knows she wants something else, but she doesn’t know what that something is. It is this ally from the past who ultimately saves her. Even though it is complicated for Suzanne, because she feels this woman elevates her while at the same time she has the impression of betraying her. Suzanne represents the film’s more romantic dimension.
(Translated from French)
