Leave One Day

The Cannes Film Festival’s opening film is a bittersweet homecoming drama with musical elements, about a French woman who returns to her hometown and begins to question her life choices.

Cécile is a chef who has recently won a televised cooking competition and is about to open her own restaurant in Paris when her father suffers a heart attack. Back in her hometown, settling into her old childhood bedroom to help out at her parents’ roadside café, she reconnects with her teenage sweetheart and old friends and begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices in life. Amélie Bonnin depicts the rural working-class milieu with tenderness, seasons the story with good humour and lightly timeworn French pop classics, and became the first debut filmmaker to open the Cannes Film Festival.

• Pia Lundberg