Quebec filmmaker Philippe Falardeau returns to the festival circuit with Lovely Day, a film that is at once playful, destabilizing, and personal.
Premiering in TIFF’s Special Presentations section, the Quebecois filmmaker adapts Alain Farah’s autobiographical novel Mille secrets mille dangers into a wedding-day chronicle that sidesteps genre convention in favor of something far more elastic and daring.
At first glance, the setup recalls familiar territory: an anxious groom (Neil Elias), a steadfast bride (Rose-Marie Perreault), divorced parents, a chaotic best man, and a day charged with expectation. But Falardeau deliberately scrambles the form, unraveling the linearity of the wedding film to mirror Alain’s escalating inner turmoil. Through its elliptical structure, claustrophobic framing, and sudden bursts of levity, Lovely Day becomes less a tale of nuptial bliss than a portrait of a man wrestling with memory, family, and the long shadow of anxiety.
Working in close collaboration with Farah himself, Falardeau shapes the material into something that oscillates between comedy and unease, always rooted in the universality of confronting one’s past in order to move forward. The result is a film that both honors and subverts the genre it inhabits, bringing wit, warmth, and disquiet in equal measure.
Screen Anarchy sat down with Falardeau to discuss adaptation as transformation, how to visualize anxiety without imitation, and why the chaos of a wedding proved the perfect stage for a reckoning with ghosts.
Screen Anarchy: Your film is an adaptation of Alain Farah’s autobiographical novel. Why did you decide to bring it to the screen?
Philippe Falardeau: When I first read the book, it wasn’t about Alain for me, it was about anyone struggling with chronic anxiety.
I recognized myself at another stage of my life. I always joke that Alain isn’t famous enough for me to make a biopic about him, but in a way the story became about both him and myself. It’s also universal.
The main character is reconciling with demons from his youth and, in a sense, finally becomes a man on the day of his wedding. That combination of a wedding and anxiety felt relatable for many people.
Did you already know Alain before you started the project?
No. But strangely enough, my girlfriend knew him. I was reading the book and laughing out loud, and she asked me what it was. When I showed her, she said, “Oh, that’s Alain’s novel. I went to school with his wife.” Suddenly, all the characters from the book felt alive in my living room.
When I approached Alain and his publisher, I told him: I don’t want to do this alone, I want to do it with you. First, because he comes from the Lebanese community and I don’t, so his perspective was essential. And second, because since the story was inspired by his life, I knew he could help me dig deeper than the book.
Meeting his parents, for example, inspired things that later shaped the film. Over time, we became friends, and we’re already talking about other projects we could develop together.
So Alain was directly involved in writing the screenplay?
Yes. This is my fourth adaptation, but the first time I’ve shared screenwriting credit with someone. Alain had never written a screenplay before, but he brought incredible insight. For me, it was tricky as a director because I usually know where I want to go from the outset.
But he said something in our first meeting that really resonated: The book already exists. It doesn’t make sense to just put it on screen. Adaptation should transform the work into something else. That openness was very generous, and it made the process much richer.
How far does the film diverge from the book?
Quite a bit, though I’d say the changes are natural extensions rather than departures. Sometimes a single sentence in the novel would inspire me to build an entire scene. For example, the mother’s speech in the book isn’t the ending, but I felt it should close the film. It connected to my own relationship with my mother, and I think many people can identify with that dynamic.
Another key change is the climax. In the novel, the narrator faints. That works in literature, but in cinema, fainting is a passive act. I needed something visual and active. While scouting locations, I came up with the idea of levitating Montreal landmarks as a metaphor for liberation. That became central to the film’s resolution.
Sometimes it was as simple as Alain telling me a personal anecdote, like how, the night before his real wedding, his father took him to dinner and told him that the biggest mistake of his life was getting married. It wasn’t ill-intentioned, just a father blurting something without realizing the effect it would have on his son. I knew instantly we had to weave that into the film.
When working on the script, did you have a clear vision genre-wise? The film feels like a comedy of errors at times, with a neurotic character that even recalls Woody Allen. Was that a conscious influence?
That’s a good point. I love wedding films like Four Weddings and a Funeral or Bridesmaids, but I made a conscious decision not to revisit them while writing. I didn’t want to borrow their ideas. I also wanted to be clear: this is not a wedding film, it’s a story that happens to unfold during a wedding.
Of course, audiences expect certain milestones, the ring exchange, for instance, which you can then twist into comedic or dramatic moments. But at its core, the story isn’t about him and his wife. It’s about him and himself. In fact, it’s more about his cousin and his parents than his bride. So the challenge was to acknowledge the genre when useful, but not let it define the film.
As for Woody Allen, I’m a big admirer. But how do you shoot anxiety without imitating him? Nobody can do Woody Allen better than Woody Allen, and citing him is not exactly popular these days. So instead, I looked for other ways of conveying anxiety: through structure, through mise-en-scène, even through the aspect ratio.
For instance, in the first 40 minutes, the audience keeps wondering: Why is he acting like this? Why is he such an ass? Then, in the second half, pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place. That disorientation is a way of making the audience feel anxious, not just watching anxiety, but experiencing it.
Similarly, the 4:3 format creates a sense of claustrophobia. These choices were all about placing viewers in the same state of unease as the character.
The structure itself is unusual, elliptical, non-linear. Was that drawn from the book or your own invention?
It’s present in the book, but in a way only literature can manage: within one sentence, you can move from past to present to future. We even tried to include the future sections from the novel, but that pushed the cut toward three hours, so we let them go.
That said, I’ve worked with this kind of structure before. My second feature, Congorama, was designed so that events were relived from another point of view. I like that as both a screenwriter and a director, because when you get into the editing room, it opens up a world of possibilities. You realize some things don’t work, you test others, and suddenly the film starts telling you what it wants to be. If this story were told in a strictly linear way, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.
I was intrigued by the recurring airplane shots, almost like an intermission. They seemed connected to both the motif of Egypt and immigration. Was that your intention?
That came partly from instinct and partly from observation. Anyone who grew up in Montreal’s north end, where much of the Lebanese community settled, knows this: it’s under the flight path. These kids grew up surrounded by concrete apartment blocks, parking lots, and airplanes flying overhead day and night. It’s part of the landscape, their environment.
At the same time, yes, it evokes the journey of the parents, from Egypt, from Lebanon, without ever turning the film into an immigration story. The canvas is the Lebanese community, but the film itself is about something else. The planes offered a poetic reminder of that history, a way of recalling migration without portraying it directly.
You mentioned experimenting in the editing room. Did you also experiment on set?
I wish. But the planning is so tight now, there isn’t much room for improvisation. Everything has to be carefully prepared in advance. I’d say most of the experimentation happened in pre-production.
For instance, I kept looking at Montreal landmarks and thought: We need to avoid the postcard effect. That’s when I came up with the idea of making them levitate. My team thought I was crazy, and we weren’t sure the budget would allow it, but with a few weeks of preparation we found a way.
On set, I still tried to grab moments when I saw something interesting, the light, or the way someone looked at the camera. There are shots in the film where characters suddenly look directly at us: at one point the bride looks into the lens and says, “Allez, Allez.” Those little instincts became punctuation marks in the film, and the editor used them beautifully. They added a layer I couldn’t have planned.
You mentioned the tight schedule, and I understand there were also complications on set because of the bombing of Lebanon. How did that affect the shoot?
Yes, that was difficult. Many of our extras and some of the cast, like Georges Khabbaz and Hiam Abou Chedid, who play the parents, had family back home. They were awake all night checking on their loved ones. Then in the morning I had to come in and say, Okay, let’s shoot the groom’s entrance, and honestly, I felt like an ass. At one point, I started to lose faith in the project.
But the cast and extras came to me and said: First, we need this. We need to create something positive. Second, we want to portray another side of Lebanese life. We are always associated with war, but here we can show something else. And third, we had assembled Muslims and Christians together as extras, groups that don’t usually mix in Montreal, and suddenly they were side by side, telling the story of an ordinary life event: a wedding.
It became something I hadn’t anticipated. The shoot turned ecumenical, in a way. And now, the Lebanese community in Montreal has really embraced the film as their own. That’s been moving to see.
The wedding scenes involve a lot of people. Did you rely heavily on rehearsals or choreography to manage that?
I wish I had more time for rehearsals. What I do try is to never start shooting right away. Instead, I gather the actors and say: Let’s do this together. Let’s find the scene. I have a good idea of what I want, but I want the actors to feel they are participating, not just executing instructions. Sometimes we read it almost like a theater play, and new ideas come from that.
Of course, in larger, complex setups there’s little room for improvisation. If you have a scene meant to unfold in 10 minutes of story time while the sun is setting, the DP has to plan for 10 hours of shooting so that the light remains consistent. Everything must be tightly organized. But in more intimate scenes, yes, that’s when you can pause, find the rhythm together, and let something fresh happen.