‘Thanks for Coming’ review: Alain Cavalier’s playful final chapter to his long-running filmed diary

Dir: Alain Cavalier. France. 2026. 82 mins

With its youthful grace, lightness and freewheeling panache, this film diary might have been made by a talented director straight out of film school. Instead it’s the self-declared swansong of 94-year-old Alain Cavalier, one of the great, unclassifiable mavericks of the French cinema scene.

Cavalier still appears to be taking the idea that life is a journey literally

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, almost two decades after his debut feature was released, that Cavalier began to explore the territory he would make his own: an intimate blend of documentary and fiction, often shot on shoestring budgets with the help of regular collaborators including longtime producer Michel Seydoux and actor Vincent Lindon. The Cavalier-Lindon project Pater was in competition in Cannes in 2011 but, true to his non-conformist spirit, the director – who long ago rejected that title, preferring that of ‘filmeur’ – has chosen Director’s Fortnight, with its rebellious fringe credentials, to present what is billed as his final work.

Like much of Cavalier’s oeuvre, Thanks For Coming will chiefly appeal to committed cinephiles, even in the director’s native France, where it is likely to receive only a limited theatrical release after Cannes. But there is such joie de vivre in this video diary – which wraps reflections on mortality up in a celebration of what it means to be alive – that it could still generate niche word-of-mouth interest in other territories, serving as a gateway to Cavalier’s extensive back catalogue.

An early adopter of digital cameras, Cavalier has the knack of lending the lightweight filmic eye his own personality – poetic, curious, ironic, sometimes a little irascible. In Thanks for Coming, which plays like a long, affectionate video message to the wider cinephile community, we watch a ‘filmer’ not interrupting his life to pick up a camera, but living life through the lens. 

In his nineties, Cavalier still appears to be taking the idea that life is a journey – literally. We see him in a series of hotel bedrooms in provincial France, doing the rounds of small-town cinemas and film clubs. Lying on the bed in one particularly cramped single room with the feel of a student residence, he pretends this is the cell of St Therese of Lisieux – subject of what is probably Cavalier’s best-known fictional feature, Therese (1986).

This is one of several moments of humour in Thanks for Coming. Others emerge from his teasing but clearly affectionate relationship with his partner, producer and film editor Francoise Widhoff. One hilarious passage sees Alain and Francoise, back in Paris after the premiere of Pater, get back on a train to Cannes when rumours of a prize circulate – only to interrupt the journey halfway when festival organisers call to disabuse them. 

But the veteran filmmaker is no cynic. He is open to moments of joy, emotion and revelation: a young footballer playing keepie-uppies in the street; a train station piano player oblivious to the commuter chaos around him; the stained satin cloth that becomes the shroud for the body of a beloved pet cat. One of the film’s most moving passages unfolds in the workshop of a neighbourhood cobbler, where Cavalier encounters a man mourning the loss of his wife of 69 years. “How was the soup?” the cobbler asks. It turns out that he makes soup to heat up for those of his clients he feels might benefit from it. Because, why wouldn’t you?