Wonderful Mornings shines at Cannes

Les Matins merveilleux: Avril Besson’s tender Cannes debut finds beauty in fragility

Presented as a Special Screening at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Wonderful Mornings marks the feature debut of French filmmaker Avril Besson. It is a gentle, sincere and deeply affectionate film — the kind of work that could easily be dismissed as a “feel-good movie,” but whose emotional intelligence deserves more attention.

The story begins with loss. After the death of her grandmother, Charlie leaves Paris in her small Renault Twingo and travels south to Cavalière. Her mission is unusual: she must deliver a collection of disco vinyl records to a man named Thierry, known as Titou.

This simple premise becomes the starting point for a delicate emotional journey.

In a coastal village almost emptied by winter, Charlie meets Marina, a trans waitress working in a pizzeria. Their encounter slowly opens the film toward romance, friendship and the possibility of emotional rebirth.

Avril Besson does not build her film around major dramatic twists. Instead, she focuses on small gestures, awkward silences and fragile moments of connection. The result is a film that moves quietly but sincerely.

At its heart, Wonderful Mornings is a story about chosen family.

Charlie is grieving.

Marina carries her own loneliness.

Titou lives with memories that still shape him.

The film brings these characters together not to solve their problems, but to allow them to exist beside one another with tenderness.

That tenderness is the film’s greatest strength.

India Hair is excellent as Charlie. She brings a strange comic vulnerability to the role, making the character both funny and emotionally exposed. Her physical awkwardness becomes part of the film’s charm.

Raya Martigny is equally impressive as Marina. One of the smartest choices in the film is that Marina’s trans identity is never reduced to trauma or explanation. She is allowed to be radiant, lonely, desirable, funny and complicated — like any fully written character should be.

This matters.

French cinema still too rarely offers trans characters this kind of ordinary emotional richness. Avril Besson films Marina with respect but without excessive solemnity. She allows her to simply live.

Eric Cantona is another surprise. In a quiet and tender role, he brings a melancholic gravity to the film. His presence adds emotional weight without disrupting the film’s lightness.

The film’s tone is both its charm and its risk. Wonderful Mornings chooses softness over conflict, sincerity over irony. Some viewers may find it too gentle, even slightly naïve. A few narrative shortcuts and underdeveloped secondary characters weaken the overall structure.

Yet the film’s emotional clarity makes these flaws easy to forgive.

What Avril Besson achieves in her first feature is not perfection, but personality. She creates a cinematic world where damaged people are not punished for being fragile. They are given time, space and sunlight.

That may sound simple.

But in contemporary cinema, such kindness can feel almost radical.

With Wonderful Mornings, Avril Besson delivers a warm, queer and emotionally generous debut — a film that quietly reminds us that healing rarely arrives dramatically. Sometimes, it begins with a road trip, a song, a stranger, and one unexpectedly beautiful morning.