If we are to believe Jean-Paul Sartre and his immortal formula, “hell”, it would be “the others”. Without questioning the accuracy of the observation, it should be noted, however, that if there is one thing that the pandemic confinement has demonstrated, it is that hell can just as well be “oneself”. With prolonged isolation, neuroses — even psychoses — are exacerbated. We think of all this in front of the brilliance Very nice dayby Patrice Laliberté, whose protagonist lives in a kind of parallel universe.
On the surface, Jérémie (Guillaume Laurin, whose interiority should not distract from the fact that he accomplishes a veritable tour de force there) is an ordinary young man, except perhaps for his reserve. bordering on silence. However, this quant-à-soi is much deeper than it seems.
Marked during childhood by the film The Truman Show (The Truman Show), in which Jim Carrey discovers that his life is nothing but a vast reality show, Jérémie is now convinced that humanity ceased to exist in 2012 and that it was “transferred” to a server. Clearly, The Matrix (The matrix) also traumatized him.
His conspiratorial beliefs (already the theme of the excellent Until the decline, from the same duo Laliberté-Laurin), Jérémie expresses them on his nocturnal podcast. Which podcast is used in the film as a kind of logorrheic narration with hypnotic effects.
During the day, Jérémie is a bicycle courier for Dom (Marc Beaupré), who entrusts him with suspicious packages. Between them, not a word is exchanged. The rare conversations Jérémie consents to take place with his push, a reclusive but voluble guy (Marc-André Grondin). But then when an influencer (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) moves into the neighboring condo, Jérémie’s wall of indifference cracks, his curiosity towards the young woman turns into obsession.
Content and form in tune
The result of a collaboration between Patrice Laliberté, Guillaume Laurin, Nicolas Krief and Geneviève Beaupré, the script offers an anxiety-provoking dive into a long-ill psyche (Jérémie reveals at one point that he had cut ties with his family years before). Without ever giving into cheap psychology, the film proves skilful in suggesting a narcissistic dimension to the ramblings of Jérémie, who obviously does not see himself as a fanatic, but as an enlightened being, a chosen one (like Neo in The Matrix).
In that he is the only one to know “the truth”, and that he can therefore only pity his congeners. Far from being simplistic, the portrait becomes more complex as contradictions emerge between Jérémie’s words and actions: long before the famous neighbor arrives, he attacks a motorist who insulted him ( stung, he shows everything except detachment).
By focusing exclusively on Jeremiah, the story goes as close as possible to the perception of the altered world of the latter. In a perfect match between content and form, the realization does the same. In this regard, as we pointed out in an interview during the premiere of the film at Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma, Very nice day was shot with a cell phone. Far from losing in quality (technique and tools have been considerably refined over the past few years), the film gains on the contrary in coherence: this technical bias implying increased proximity, we immediately enter Jérémie’s bubble for n stand out.
Very fluid, the many sequence shots follow the protagonist on the track or replace his gaze, as in these dully paranoid shots through the peephole of his door.
Throughout, there is a poignant dimension to the spectacle of this character certain to have taken refuge in a space of freedom because he “knows”, whereas he was rather locked up in a mental prison.
Moreover, the most chilling observation in Very nice day is that Jeremiah, and the pandemic has revealed that they are legion like him, may be sorry that humanity has been replaced by a simulacrum, the reality, the real one, is that he deluded himself into great reinforcement of untruths and alternative facts. To each his own hell, therefore, and to each his own womb.