A movie set in the world of classical music that has Emma at its center. She is a young conductor who is struggling with her father, who is also her manager, whom she has a strained relationship with, and Naïlle, her partner and cellist in the orchestra.
With a runtime of 120 minutes, the movie feels longer than that. Emma is a character that is developing until the last minutes. A character that is mainly known through interpersonal relationships that allow to delve, if only in the form of glimpses, in her past to understand her present as a career-driven person. There is a scene beautifully edited where flashbacks are intermingled with a performance of Mahler in which it is easy to see through her unlike what came before, and enhances the music dynamics, both its forte and piano intensities. Like Tár (2022), Chloé Robichaud's Les Jours heureux is not so much a movie about music but rather about a person and her predicaments, both personal and professional. There are other layers in which the movie could be analyzed and thought. For instance, the influence of heteronormative hegemony on our behavior and thoughts, the unclear boundary where the love from a parent can be rendered as negative pressure or trauma.
Ultimately, Les Jours heureux suffers from an inability to transmit the emotions it aims to. There are many scenes that could've been reason enough to sympathize with the protagonist that weren't effectively executed and presented. It's not a bad movie, but the same ideas were better depicted elsewhere.
