Lovely Day (Mille Secrets Mille Dangers), directed by Philippe Falardeau and based on an autobiographical novel by McGill’s own Alain Farah, weaves together Farah’s past as a young Lebanese Montrealer with the climactic moments of his wedding on the steps of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Although it starts and ends on the same day, the film meticulously unpacks the events of the last 20 years, jumping backwards and forwards in time to immerse the audience in Farah’s head as he wrestles with his past.
At the request of McGill students, there was a special screening of the film at Cinéma du Musée on Nov. 4, featuring a question-and-answer session with Falardeau and Farah themselves. After the screening, The Tribune sat down with Farah to discuss his journey from writing his novel to co-writing the script for Lovely Day to seeing the finished movie.
“It’s a process that produces a lot of ambiguity, but not from my point of view, because I am completely comfortable with the idea that we’re not just one thing,” Farah told The Tribune. “I’m able to be at the same time the character, the narrator, the co-script writer, the professor, the dad, the whatever.”
The novel itself, Mille Secrets Mille Dangers, published in French in 2021 with no English translation, stretches over 500 pages and draws stylistic inspiration from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Adapting such a complex book into a feature film posed a challenge for Falardeau, who had to juggle the timelines of Farah’s childhood, adolescence, and wedding day in just a two-hour film. To make this more manageable, Farah and Falardeau decided to remove an additional future storyline from the book, focusing instead on the past and present.
Cutting between these different timelines, while cinematically complex, is crucial to the film’s deeper effect: Making the audience not just see, but empathize with Farah’s anxiety disorder, which manifests throughout the story in his panic attacks, and also in his climactic loss of consciousness during his own mother’s wedding toast.
“[Falardeau] often said while we were prepping, that it’s not enough to just see a character that’s tense or sweating. He wanted the people in the theatre to feel that anxiety,” Farah said. “I think he reached that goal. We’ve seen some people looking pretty anxious coming out of the movie.”
By introducing the story of his parents’ divorce and the onset of his chronic illness as a young child, and painstakingly tracing these threads through the friendships and betrayals of his adolescence, the film succeeds in placing us in Farah’s shoes as he navigates his long wedding day—which, of course, comes with its own ups and downs.
All of these timelines are set against the backdrop of Montreal. However, Farah emphasized that this wasn’t the Montreal we see in so many films—seemingly composed solely of downtown and the Mile End. The majority of Lovely Day is filmed where Farah grew up, in Ville Saint-Laurent, with notable pit stops at St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Basin. While Montreal is the ‘city of a thousand steeples,’ for Lovely Day, the action revolves around its three great domes: The Oratory, the Biosphere, and (how could we forget) the Orange Julep. These three landmarks, built in different neighbourhoods and eras for very different purposes, anchor the film in a Montreal that feels dynamic, diverse, and above all, lived-in.
“For me, a real concern was that kids from the community, or Montrealers at large, felt that this was our Montreal, and there was a sense of belonging to that city,” Farah said. “You see the traffic jams, and you see the haziness, and you see some neighbourhoods that you don’t see too often [in movies]. But for me, despite a certain ugliness, there is kind of a beauty. When you see all those towers, this is where we grew up, most of us immigrant kids.”
By filming these locations with care, Lovely Day shifts the emotional centre of Montreal away from the Mile End, bringing a new side of the city to the cinema as it delves into Farah’s very personal adventures.
