by Hudson Moura
Updated on October 31, 2025
With Partir un jour (Leave One Day, feature’s English title), French writer-director Amélie Bonnin returns to the same emotional terrain through two distinct cinematic works: a 2021 short film and a 2025 feature-length expansion. Both revolve around family tension, rural identity, and unspoken love, explored through a gendered mirroring. The short focuses on Julien Béguin, while the feature reframes the narrative through Cécile Béguin. Despite this shift in perspective, the emotional core remains the same: a prodigal child returns to their village, only to face the lingering ghosts of intergenerational conflict and unresolved affection.
Both versions are imbued with musical melancholy, drawing inspiration from Jacques Demy’s tradition of French sung cinema (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort), but reinterpreted in a more restrained, naturalistic register reminiscent of Alain Resnais’ On connaît la chanson. Here, music does not announce itself as spectacle but functions as emotional leakage—pop lyrics surface in the spaces where words fail, and unsent letters are transformed into silent acts of longing.
In the 2021 short film, we meet Julien Béguin (Bastien Bouillon), a Paris-based writer who returns to his native village as his father Gérard (François Rollin) prepares to retire from his butcher shop. There, Julien reconnects with Caroline(Juliette Armanet), a high school flame now working as a supermarket cashier—and visibly pregnant. Their emotional reunion unfolds beside a village swimming pool, replacing the ice rink that will reappear in the feature-length film. Their story remains unresolved—until a tender cinematic turn reveals that Julien’s novel is, in fact, a 300-page letter written to her, which she hasn’t read it.
At the heart of both versions lies Gérard, a character who crystallizes the intergenerational tension driving the narrative. Rollin delivers a remarkable performance, portraying Gérard as a man simmering with pride, disappointment, and unexpressed love. He keeps a small notebook in which he meticulously records passages from his son’s novel that he interprets as subtle jabs at their rural upbringing. At one point, he angrily cites a line from his son’s book: ‘In my village, the most cultivated thing was the potato field beside the highway’—page 112.” For Gérard, this sentence serves as irrefutable proof of Julien’s shame—a betrayal disguised as literary irony. Julien may have left the village behind, but Gérard’s annotated notebook becomes a quiet indictment, a tangible record of emotional injury. Leaving home is one thing; shedding its psychic residue is quite another.
The feature-length version retains the same title, Partir un jour (Leave One Day, 2025), but flips the narrative. Julien becomes Cécile Béguin (Juliette Armanet, now in the lead), a Parisian chef returning to the village after her father suffers a heart attack. Like Julien, she is pregnant—and like him, she hides it. Gérard, still played with quiet fire by Rollin, refuses to retire or seek treatment, clinging to the kitchen of his family restaurant as both domain and identity.
Gérard’s notebook of grievances reappears, this time filled with comments Cécile made during a televised Top Chefappearance—an event that elevated her to local celebrity status but, in her father’s eyes, humiliated their origins. These scenes strike a delicate balance between comedy and reflection. Yet the most poignant emotional revelations are delivered not through dialogue but through song. In one particularly moving scene, Gérard, alone in the kitchen, quietly sings Je veux mourir sur scène (“I want to die on stage”). His voice, fragile and nearly tuneless, reveals defiant pride and quiet surrender—an expression of tragic masculinity. Later, when he sings Cécile, ma fille (“Cécile, My Daughter”), the song becomes an unspoken love letter, both bitter and tender.
This gendered mirroring between the short and feature-length versions adds a compelling layer of self-reflexivity. Both protagonists—Julien and Cécile—are burdened by the weight of shame, legacy, and unmet expectations. Yet the feature-length version goes further, delving into Cécile’s emotional landscape, including her relationship with her whimsical Italian mother, Fanfan, who dreams of driving her camper van to Italy one day, and her unresolved past with Raphaël(Bastien Bouillon again), now the village mechanic. Despite Bouillon’s strong presence, Raphaël’s character never fully takes shape, remaining emotionally elusive and narratively underdeveloped.
Throughout both films, Bonnin uses music not to entertain but to evoke interiority. Songs emerge not as set pieces but as flickers of affect—characters sing softly, almost absentmindedly, as if releasing thoughts they can no longer hold. The title track Partir un jour recurs like a refrain of longing. Armanet’s background as a singer adds depth to these musical moments, while Bouillon’s off-key delivery, particularly in the feature, feels intentionally discordant—his Raphaël doesn’t fit the mold of a romantic lead, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The short film stands out for its narrative precision and emotional rawness. It is lean, focused, and unburdened by excess. In contrast, the feature expands the story world, bringing in more characters, subplots, and emotional registers. As a result, some of the original’s intensity is diffused, and the film occasionally drifts from its strongest thread—the father-daughter relationship.
Yet the feature ultimately finds its strength in Cécile’s complexity. Her silence, her ambivalence, and her buried pregnancy speak to broader questions: What do we inherit from the places we’ve outgrown? And what, if anything, do we owe them in return?
Fanfan’s unmoving camper van, forever parked in the garden, becomes a quiet metaphor for this ambivalence, as does the family restaurant, where culinary ambition and familial obligation simmer side by side.
In both versions, Partir un jour is less about departure than about what remains—inscribed in notebooks, suspended in unread letters, and revived through the lyrics of forgotten songs. Bonnin’s films whisper where others shout, allowing music to function not as escape, but as memory and mourning. The short film may burn brighter, but the feature offers a richer, more textured meditation on home, legacy, and the bittersweet impossibility of true departure. To leave a place doesn’t mean it leaves you. Sometimes, it sings you back. 
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 