𝙲𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚖𝚊, 𝚂𝚙𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚕𝚎, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚐𝚎 𝙼𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚢 𝙱𝚎𝚗𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚑 𝙿𝚎𝚛𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎

𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙴𝚕𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚌 𝚔𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚜

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙿𝚒𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚎 𝚂𝚊𝚟𝚊𝚍𝚘𝚛𝚒

𝙲𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚜 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

In The Electric Kisses, Pierre Salvadori creates a world that initially feels playful, chaotic, and almost weightless — a romantic comedy filled with carnivals, attractions, theatrical gestures, bright lights, and bodies constantly placed on display. Yet beneath this colorful surface, the film slowly reveals something much sadder and more complex: a meditation on spectacle, loneliness, desire, and the fragile line between a human being and an image.

More than once while watching the film, I thought of Charlie Chaplin. Not simply because of the circus atmosphere or the world of performers, but because of the emotional structure hidden beneath the comedy itself. In Chaplin’s cinema, laughter was never entirely joyful; it always carried traces of humiliation, vulnerability, and survival. Comedy existed side by side with pain. “The Electric Kisses” carries a similar emotional tension. Beneath its humor and visual excess lies a persistent melancholy, as if spectacle itself were being used to protect something deeply wounded and human.

The carnival in the film is not merely decorative. Salvadori transforms it into something resembling cinema itself: a collective space where people gather to project desire, fantasy, loneliness, and memory onto an illusion. The spectators lining up to see “Electric Venus” are not so different from spectators sitting in a movie theater. They come to emotionally believe in an image. And like cinema itself, the attraction depends on the strange human willingness to invest emotionally in something artificial while fully knowing it is constructed.

Suzanne gradually becomes more than a performer. She turns into a cinematic image — a presence shaped by the gaze and desire of others. One of the film’s most compelling ideas is the way performance slowly enters identity itself. Salvadori suggests that professions built around spectacle and entertainment do not remain external to the self. The role eventually invades the person performing it. Suzanne no longer simply plays “Electric Venus”; she slowly disappears inside the image that others want to see.

This transformation becomes even more unsettling because the film constantly links spectacle to economics. Nearly everyone around Suzanne depends, emotionally or financially, on keeping the illusion alive. Her body, image, and performance become part of an economy that others survive through. What begins as entertainment slowly reveals itself as labor, commerce, and emotional exploitation. Even more interestingly, Suzanne herself eventually enters the same cycle, attempting to survive through another form of illusion and performance. Salvadori never turns the film into a direct political statement, yet the critique quietly remains beneath the surface: even love, grief, desire, and the human body can become commodities within systems of spectacle.

The film is also deeply concerned with the act of looking. Love in “The Electric Kisses” often seems to pass through the eyes before it reaches the heart. At the beginning, Suzanne is easy to look at because she exists as an attraction , an image designed for fantasy and consumption. But once love becomes emotionally real, looking itself becomes difficult. Characters hide their eyes when they feel guilt, shame, or emotional vulnerability. Direct gaze suddenly carries intimacy and danger. The film quietly asks whether people truly fall in love with human beings, or with the images they create around them.

There is also something fascinating in the film’s relationship to science and physical sensation. Electricity, touch, vibration, and bodily reaction become part of its emotional language. Love is treated not simply as something poetic, but almost as a physical force moving between bodies. Emotion behaves like energy: circulating, transferring, changing form, but never entirely disappearing. Salvadori gives desire a strangely material quality, making romance feel simultaneously playful, scientific, and melancholic.What ultimately prevents the film from collapsing into cynicism is the vulnerability of its characters. Even those participating in systems of manipulation and performance remain emotionally exposed. Betrayal in the film rarely comes from pure cruelty; it emerges instead from loneliness, fear, grief, or the desperate need to survive. The characters continue the illusion not simply because they are manipulative, but because illusion itself becomes necessary for emotional survival.

“The Electric Kisses” is not always structurally balanced. At times the film becomes overcrowded with ideas, tonal shifts, and narrative movement, and some of its most interesting themes remain only partially explored. Yet even this instability feels connected to the world Salvadori creates — a world built on spectacle, chaos, emotional improvisation, and the fragile human need to transform loneliness into performance.

In the end, “The Electric Kisses” becomes less a film about romance than a film about cinema itself: about the human desire to turn grief into spectacle, longing into illusion, and loneliness into images capable of being loved.