Leave one day on Canal Plus: an enchanted nugget (review)

From her César-winning short, Amélie Bonnin made a feature film presented at the opening of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A joyous film about a thirty-year-old who confronts her past to reinvent herself. Juliette Armanet made a flamboyant debut there.

A great success in theaters with more than 650,000 spectators, Partir un jour is broadcast for the first time on Canal Plus this Tuesday evening (and available for streaming on MyCanal). Première recommends Amélie Bonnin’s film, to watch alone or with others in karaoke mode! Our review:

It’s one of those success stories that no one could have anticipated. A first short which gave birth to a first feature, invited to open Cannes. Never seen before in the history of the festival! So, a flashback is in order. Until 2022, date of presentation of Leave one day – the short at the Clermont festival. Amélie Bonnin stages the return to his hometown of a thirty-year-old (Bastien Bouillon) went to Paris to become a writer and his reunion with a former classmate (Juliette Armanet). The film leaves with the audience award, the start of a collection of trophies concluded with a César. And an impulse that will make you want to develop this story at length. By taking up the principle of songs which extend the dialogues as in We know the song, performed here by the actors. But by reversing the gender of the characters.

In Leave one day – in the long run, it is Cécile, a chef on the verge of opening her first gastronomic restaurant in Paris who returns to the village of her childhood following the heart attack of her father (François Rollin, moving like the wonderful Dominique Blanc who plays his wife), owner of a roadside restaurant and who will meet Raphaël again, her childhood sweetheart. By changing format, Amélie Bonnin has lost none of the beauty of the way she looks at the province, increasingly scrutinized by French cinema but rarely with this empathy. Like the playlist stripped of all snobbery of his film, from Dalida to 2 be 3 via Benabar or Nougaro…

But by reversing the characters, Amélie Bonnin creates here a magnificent portrait of a woman who discovers the need to confront the unsaid things of the past (love, family) in order to move forward and reinvent herself. And each time she finds the right tone to orchestrate these harsh face-to-face encounters (the father-daughter relationship damaged by accumulated misunderstandings), radiant (Cécile and Raphaël’s return to the ice rink of their youth) or hurtful (when Cécile discovers that Raphaël is married and a father).

Without sentimentality, denying nothing of the gap that can widen when we move away from where we grew up, Amélie Bonnin touches directly to the heart. While magnifying the luminous side of Bastien Bouillon and revealing the immense acting talent of Juliette Armanet, whose expressive face says more than a thousand words. A joy of a film!

By Amélie Bonnin. With Juliette Armanet, Bastien Bouillon, François Rollin… Duration 1h35.