Everyday Is Like Sunday Review

Everyday is Like Sunday

Everyday Is Like Sunday might not aim very high when it comes to creating a mumblecore dramedy set in Toronto – a city already bearing such a notoriously screw-faced hipster reputation that “mumblecore” as a genre seems to sound almost redundant as a reflection of it and passé at the same time – but it thankfully hits enough genuinely great notes to feel satisfying for a clued in viewer both inside and outside its core demographic. It has a rough start and some decidedly jagged edges showing at times, but thanks to some great performances that feel organic enough to be believable, director Pavan Moondi delivers a solid enough pastiche of being an aimless twentysomething in Canada’s largest city.

Mark (David Dineen-Porter), Jason (Adam Gurfinkel), and Flora (Coral Osborne) are roommates. Jason and Flora are the couple on the verge of a breakdown, while Mark is the lovesick third wheel without steady employment. Mark finds a girl he likes (Bo Martyn) that might not entirely love him back and might be going back to her considerably older ex, often making him a confused and sometimes depressed mess. Flora has been growing increasingly fed up with Jason’s aimless inability to join another band despite being a talented musician, and decides to go on tour with an actual working band as a photographer while he stays behind to work in a pizza shop.

In typical mumblecore fashion, Everyday Is Like Sunday is a film about relationships and interactions rather than plot motivation and contrivance. Most of the time the trio of leads finds a way to get into a scene, but it sometimes takes them a moment. The moments of the film that actually try to be funny quite often aren’t, feeling sometimes excruciatingly forced and scripted (a bit about an expensive raincoat Mark buys is particularly dire). Sometimes, however, they lead to sort of an inspired bit of chemistry within the same scene. Porter, Gurfinkel, Osborne, and Martyn are particularly adept at reading a situation and feeling out the tone and emotion that needs to be given. It’s often like watching jazz musicians trying to find the rhythm in the middle of a jam session, but once they all get cooking things really come to life.

On a technical level, Moondi’s film also suffers from some inconsistencies. It’s exceedingly well shot and edited, but a few scenes suffer from some awful ADR word that sounds and feels nothing like what the film actually looks like. It’s kind of like a reflection of the film as a whole. It’s an ambitious project about aimless people that sometimes misses the mark, but the emotional high points alternate between emotionally satisfying and entertaining depending on the mood of a scene. It seems to be constructed with a more commercial eye in mind, which makes it refreshingly light on the local colour detracting from the plot, but it still might not connect to very many outside the people already living these kinds of lives.

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