Chloé Robichaud’s Days of Happiness (Les jours heureux): Finding Feeling
By Maurie Alioff – Québec Correspondent
A setup scene in Robichaud’s movie about a young orchestra conductor shows her panicking when a rubber raft she’s on drifts away from a lakeshore beach. Emma’s terror clearly symbolizes her fear of diving into life’s turbulent currents.
On the surface, the youthful, even sometimes child-like Emma (Sophie Desmarais) handles her profession exceptionally well, conducting musicians with an attention to detail that can be overly meticulous and too demanding. But in reality, Emma gets undermined by jockeying for control with her dominating father, Patrick (Sylvain Marcel), who manages her career. Emma tries to hold her ground, but he undermines her even as he pushes her toward excellence. An undercurrent of fear runs through their relationship. Patrick’s disdain and anger, his volatility could escalate from emotional violence to physical assault. In a key scene, we discover that his detested father beat him viciously.
The crux of the film is Emma’s relationship with this domineering man, who has probably stifled her emotional range. Her story arc is getting herself out from under his thumb. Meanwhile, another father-figure, the veteran Phillipe (Vincent Leclerc) tells her she has serious skills, but eventually they will be forgotten. Technicians come and go. “If you want to stir emotions,” he says, “make me feel the music, you have to feel those things as well.”
The trajectory of Days of Happiness is all about Emma taking a dive. We see her fear at the beginning of the movie on the lake – not only symbolically, but in reality too. The movie favours close-ups and medium close-ups, bringing the camera close to the characters, especially Emma, and offering an intimacy that contests (contrasts or competes) with the big public sequences in which Desmerais conducts real musicians from a Montreal orchestra. With her boyish hair and Audrey Hepburn eyes, both elfin and very intense, her character has an eloquent arm-dancing style Desmarias learned by carefully studying conductors. Emma’sfresh relationship with Naëlle (Nour Belkh) offers momentary refuge from the personal and professional tensions in her life, but it’s wary and not deeply rooted.
The movie’s crisp, sharply etched, rapidly edited images, were probably influenced by Denys Arcand’s work. For me, impeccable pretty shots reach a point where they risk getting sterile. Nice homes, nice shirts, nice skirts, nice wines, even at one point an impeccable black eye.
In a climactic scene, as Emma conducts, she sees flashes of her private life. She has synched the professional and the personal, and plunges into emotion. As for music, the film beautifully evokes the architecture of building a score into a performance. “I wanted to present classical music as something that has modern appeal,” Robichaud told Variety, “where a conductor can be a woman my age [mid-30s]. Mostly the film is about relationships — the music is a character in itself.”
Days of Happiness was produced by Pierre Even, who handled the late Jean-Marc Vallé’s C.R.A.Z.Y., Café de Flore, and Robichaud’s political satire, Boundaries. He and Robichaud are superb conductors of movie production.Following its TIFF 2023 premiere, the picture opens in October.
Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and taught screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. A former editor for Cinema Canada and Take One, as well as other magazines, he is affiliated with the Quebec media industry publication, CTVM.Info. His articles have appeared in various publications, including Canadian Cinematographer, POV Magazine, and The New York Times. He is the Québec Correspondent for Northernstars™.
