As a child, Jérémie was traumatized by the film The Truman Show (The Truman Show), in which Jim Carrey realizes that his life is only a simulacrum, a reality show. A conspiratorialist more resigned than an activist, he is convinced that, since 2012, humanity has ceased to exist and has been “transferred” to a server. Obviously the movie The Matrix (The matrix) also disturbed the young courier. Shot with smart phone, Very nice dayby Patrice Laliberté, goes as close as possible to the fractured psyche of its protagonist, embodied by Guillaume Laurin, a long-time friend and co-screenwriter.
Like Patrice Laliberté’s previous film, the excellent Until the declinethe Netflix success set in the universe of a group of survivalists convinced of the imminent collapse of civilization, Very nice day attaches itself to a character who has built his own reality with a lot of untruths.
“The two films were written in parallel, in the same space-time, between 2017 and 2019, explains Patrice Laliberté. We finished writing Until the declineand Very nice day appeared. I found it interesting to work on the theme of derealization, that is to say when someone is convinced that the world around him does not exist. It’s kind of the concept of the movie The Matrix. He feels like a chosen one, like Neo; the world revolves around him…”
The film offers a complex and insidiously frightening portrait: a mute and solitary being who only expresses himself through his conspicuous podcast, Jérémie (Guillaume Laurin) gradually establishes himself as “the sociopath next door”. . Because when a famous influencer (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) moves into the neighboring condo, curiosity quickly turns into obsession, with “ stalking » real and virtual at stake. Chilling.
So much so that Jeremy forgets a package, which unleashes the wrath of his boss Dom (Marc Beaupré), who sends his minions to him.
“By playing Jérémie, I was venturing into a strange area, confides Guillaume Laurin. He is very reserved. Like my character in Until the decline, he keeps a lot of things inside, he represses and tries not to stand out, and it’s more in the virtual that he exists. For example, I lived in a neighborhood that was really gentrified, and one day, two Instagrammers moved in next door to me. I had no, but no interaction with them in real life, but I realized that on the Internet, there, I could. It’s not my reality at all, this virtual existence, this lack of tangible communion, but I found it fascinating, this duality, and it played on the character, that’s clear. »
Speaking of reality, the real one, the latter caught up with the fiction in progress: in a passage since cut, Jérémie expressed the wish, in his podcast, that a virus would eradicate half of the population. Shortly after, COVID appeared, causing the pandemic we know.
Full of Jeremiah
By collaborating on the script, Guillaume Laurin was able to contribute more to the creation of a character who, at the risk of oversimplification, is in perpetual psychosis.
“There was a job, both for Until the decline and for Very nice day, search compared to YouTube, and more specifically TikTok in the case of this film. It fed us. All these groups of people who try to transmit their “knowledge” to you with their videos. In Very nice day, we tried to get inside the head of this guy who feels both isolated and above the masses. At the beginning, we didn’t have a specific referent, but the more we shared videos, the more we said to ourselves, “crush, that’s Jérémie!” »
“When we started writing, bands like QAnon were emerging. The pandemic and the confinement have exacerbated the loneliness of many people, and the loneliness, the fragility, it is at the heart of the film”, adds Patrice Laliberté, who, in the same breath, describes a collaborative writing “in canvas”.
“Normally, in the cinema, we have a first gesture of writing, a scenario, which we then shoot. With this film, we wanted to experiment more with a circular process. We would write for a week or two, we would shoot what we had written, then we would write something else, and so on. We were editing for three or four days… The film evolved in a very natural way, with an opening in relation to beautiful accidents. »
Ultimately, production spanned no less than four years, with the filming of Until the decline right in the middle, not that we notice any problem of continuity whatsoever in the final result.
More than a gimmick
We mentioned it at the outset, Very nice day was shot with a smart phone. In recent years, other filmmakers have done the same. We think for example of Steven Soderbergh and his thriller Unsane (disturbed) or its sports drama High Flying Bird. The social drama Tangerine, by Sean Baker, resorted to it for a brilliant result. Here, the result is an increased closeness with Jérémie: we literally enter his bubble.
“There is a very pragmatic aspect involved, explains Patrice Laliberté. With the cell phone, we have no choice but to be glued to the character. Quickly, we made the bet to rule out the classic shot-reverse shot method – we tried it and it was not good. We got a stabilizer, so we had the equivalent of a steadicam available to us at all times even if we didn’t have a penny. As an indication, despite the millions for Until the declinewe only had one steadicam only for ten days. »
Hence this abundance of very fluid sequence shots. Be that as it may, filming with a telephone remains a relatively uncommon practice. Therefore, a certain mystery still surrounds him. Thus, contrary to what one might think, it is not enough to simply point your device at this or that by pressing the record button. Different lenses can be attached to said device, depending on the type of image and compositions sought, and the presence of staging and photo direction is as fundamental as with a traditional or digital camera.
“We alternated between three objectives, depending on the shot : a wide-angle for wide shots, another for close-up portraits, etc., specifies Patrice Laliberté. We wanted to break the cellular aesthetic, because everyone has a phone in their pocket and knows the feel of a cellular image. »
For Guillaume Laurin, the experience turned out to be unique and memorable. “I have never experienced such an intimate set. The most we were was seven. Sometimes it was just Patrice and me. I don’t believe I could have delivered what I deliver with anyone other than him. »
Premiered at Rendez-vous Québec cinema on Thursday, Very nice day will be the subject of a film lesson on April 23 at the Cinémathèque before hitting theaters on May 6.