‘Lovely Day’ TIFF Review: Between Panic and Pandemonium

Among the dozens, if not hundreds, of chaotic weddings that have filled the history of cinema and television, Lovely Day carves out an unusual territory. While the wedding at hand is central to the narrative, more than half of the film delves into the backstory of one of its protagonists, Alain, a tortured and neurotic young man of Arab descent who suffers from an autoimmune disease that causes severe stomach pain and forces him to take dozens of medications at all times. What the Canadian director of My Salinger Year does here is weave back and forth in time, using the wedding preparations as the “present” while devoting much of the running time to Alain’s adolescence.

Alain (Neil Elias) is 28 and caught up in the classic pre-wedding chaos: guests, family squabbles, oversights, complications, and so on. In the midst of it all, of course, he’s also struggling with his fragile health and his wish to feel well on that day. From that tension—compounded by his panic attacks—Falardeau travels back in time to recount much of Alain’s life, marked by an intense mother and a quiet, distant father. But the main focus of that period lies in his friendships and in his obsession with a girl who is a close friend, yet with whom he never manages to take the step toward something more romantic.

Co-written by Alain Farah and based on a novel with strong autobiographical elements, Lovely Day dwells on the protagonist’s turbulent friendship with his unruly cousin Eduord (Hassan Mahbouba), but spends just as much time on his fraught relationship with his parents—Elias (Georges Khabbaz) and Yolande (Hiam Abou Chedid)—a divorced immigrant couple from Lebanon and Egypt who constantly blame one another for their son’s fragile, medicated condition. Serious as all this may sound, the film’s tone leans heavily on comedy, since these conflicts and tensions mostly play out in a humorous register.

At a certain point the movie finally shifts its full attention to the wedding itself and, as one might expect, it becomes a full-blown pandemonium, where every possible mishap seems to appear and even the rings go missing at the crucial moment. From there on, blending raw honesty with a few more conventional comic beats, this Franco-Canadian film tries to find a middle ground between amiable popular entertainment and a more candid, unsparing look at a life, as the original French title suggests, filled with a thousand secrets and a thousand dangers.