Partir un Jour (Leave One Day) reveals its gimmick so quickly it almost feels like an accident. It's late, and Cecile (Juliette Armanet) gets the call that her father has had another heart attack. She's fretting over the upcoming launch of her restaurant, and her relationship with her parents isn't rosy to begin with.

Her partner, Sofiane (Tewfik Jallab), insists she return home nonetheless. Just as they're about to argue, he breaks out in song. But it's not a glossy, polished musical number. His voice cracks and falters. The music fills the room as if from a speaker. It's like the world entire has turned into a karaoke.

She joins in for a chorus, and the song ends as abruptly as it began. No big finish, no dance. Instead, it's a burst of lightning in the same way how our minds remember snippets of songs at the most inopportune moments.

As Cecile returns home, these explosions of music follow with her. They're at turns funny, revealing, heartbreaking, and bizarre. Even the credit sequences highlight themselves like the lyrics at karaoke. The world is a stage, even if we're not all players.

I think Partir un Jour works for me because I don't recognize these songs. Had I grown up in France in the 90s, I probably would have a completely different history with them. In that case, who knows how I'd feel about ownership to their meaning. It's a risk that any jukebox musical takes. These songs are tied to our very being, and using them for another story, no matter how universal the theme, can easily rub the viewer the wrong way.

Yet it's hard not to smile when the results are this sincere and chaotic. It takes skill to act and sing in a way that's purposefully clumsy. Watch, for example, how sweetly Amandine Dewasmes sings her reveal, where she balances the acknowledgement that she never was anyone's first choice with a hint of bitterness how, despite this, she ended up with the boy they all competed over. Naturally, it turns out that boy never grew up into a man, and their lives never left the small neighborhood they started in.

Writer and director Amélie Bonnin balances these bittersweet truths beautifully. Partir un Jour is funny because it is sad, yet it's never resentful. Some of the characters choose to view their circumstances as victories, even if the unspoken agreement is they're anything but. Yet everyone plays the cards they're dealt, or sing the songs they can, without complaining. There's something immensely charming about that.

By the end, nothing resolves itself, and Partir un Jour deliberately refuses any safe or clean answers typical to this genre. Instead, we end up at the same crossroads the story started in, uncertain where we'll go next. Pop-songs, Bonnin argues, give us temporary relief, but they're not solutions. To rely on them is to deny ourselves the ability to grow and find our own music.

But, for a time, it is nice to kick back and let others vocalize all the ways that we hurt and desire, even if it's just for a chorus.