Cuisine meets musical in Partir un jour, at Alliance Française on August 14
Visions Ouest presents the Cannes opener about a star chef who reconnects with her earthy, truck-stop roots
Partir un jour.
Visions Ouest Productions presents Partir un jour at Alliance Française Vancouver on August 14
FILMMAKER AMÉLIE BONNIN made her feature debut with this light-as-mille-feuille musical about a top TV chef who returns to her truck-stop roots.
In the movie, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Cécile (French singer Juliette Armanet) is in the throes of opening a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris when her father (François Rollin) has a heart attack. She’s forced to head back to her small hometown, where her mother (Dominique Blanc) and weakened dad are trying to keep up with the demands of serving traditional, nonsnooty French dishes like bavette to truckers. Putting her workaholic life on pause, she helps them turn things around‚ while falling for her charismatic old boyfriend (Bastien Bouillon), the town’s mechanic.
The central tension is that to this point Cécile has been embarrassed about her background, publicly disparaging country dishes—and offending Papa in the process.
Did we mention they sing? Partir un jour is quite possibly the most casually song-and-dance-filled musical ever made, with characters breaking into Stromae’s “Alors on danse” and other French-language pop classics. Aside from Armanet, refreshingly unaffected in her big-screen debut, most of them aren’t endowed with the strongest singing voices either, but it all seems to work, albeit quirkily, in this film that celebrates the idea that we find our true selves when we return to our roots.
Food is always at the centre of it all, of course, whether the chef is helping make fries at the truck stop or putting the finishing touches on a sculptural dish at her Paris outpost.
It's offbeat, earthy, and lightly romantic—an odd recipe, but one that should move anyone who feels the push and pull of their parental home. 
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