The 79th Festival de Cannes opens on Tuesday, May 12 with Pierre Salvadori's "La Vénus électrique" (The Electric Kiss), a 1920s-Paris-set period comedy starring Pio Marmaï, Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Vimala Pons, Gustave Kervern and Madeleine Baudot, the festival press office confirmed. [1][2] The selection runs the festival through May 23 and places Salvadori — long a critic's auteur of mid-budget French comedy — in a slot Cannes usually reserves for an international headline. [1]

The choice reads as deliberate. Recent Cannes opening nights have leaned on English-language star vehicles (the festival's commercial buffer); the Salvadori slot is a French-language period comedy with no obvious crossover hook beyond Lellouche's profile. Variety and Deadline frame the elevation as the festival treating the opening as a curatorial statement rather than a marketing exercise. [3] The 12-day calendar then carries Asghar Farhadi's Competition entry, returns from Cristian Mungiu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, and the smallest Eurovision-adjacent boycott pressure since the festival's 2022 Russian cycle — though the festival has not announced any titles withdrawn over the war.

The opening sets the cultural week's frame. Met Gala Monday turns the costume calendar into a Manhattan event; Cannes Tuesday re-anchors it on a Mediterranean-art-cinema axis. The two co-occur with the lost-science and labor-strike registers stacking on the Friday before. The festival is one of the few institutions on the calendar still treating the calendar itself as the program.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles