Worth: $17.00
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Cast:
Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas, Grégory Gadebois, Charlotte Rampling
Intro:
… a greatly human film about a complex topic which is peopled by equally complex characters.
Prolific French director François Ozon tackles the thorny subject of euthanasia in his latest film Everything Went Fine. Adapted from the book by Emmanuèlle Bernheim (who collaborated with Ozon for two of his films before her death in 2017), the film chronicles the impossible task Emmanuèlle (Sophie Marceau) is given by her father André (André Dussollier) when he asks her to arrange his suicide after suffering a debilitating stroke.
Ozon refuses to wallow in sentimentality or assume a moral position on the subject of euthanasia. The matter-of-fact manner in which the film plays out is one of its major strengths.
André Bernheim is a deeply flawed man, who has made it particularly difficult for his daughters to connect with him over the years. His selfishness and casual cruelty is visible in small flashbacks that come from Emmanuèlle’s point-of-view. He is also a man filled with a certain joie de vivre that is in part infectious. He is a man used to getting his own way; Emmanuèlle states that it is impossible to refuse her father. He is also a man who isn’t deeply concerned about the cost that getting his own way comes with.
For Emmanuèlle and her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) the emotional toll of being asked to essentially kill a parent is acutely felt. Left essentially to their own devices to organise the assisted suicide, the sisters are partly thrown back to their childhoods where neither parent was nurturing and required them to raise themselves.
Frequent Ozon collaborator, Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand, Angel) plays their emotionally distant and chronically ill mother, Claude. There is a hatefulness in the way that Claude is portrayed that acts as some kind of foil to generate more sympathy for the mercurial André. The fact that Claude married an openly gay man who refused to care for her during her episodes of crippling depression and eventual Parkinson’s disease gets somewhat glossed over. Her heartbreak is only a sliver of the story.
Heartbreak is certainly a part of Emmanuèlle’s story. Not only do we see her own conflicted sorrow, we are given glimpses into the sorrow of André’s erstwhile lover, Gérard (Grégory Gadebois). André at first refuses to see his ex-lover because he doesn’t want anyone to view him in his diminished post-stroke capacity. As the date comes closer for André’s assisted suicide in Switzerland, he allows more people to know of his plans and to allow them to visit him in the rehab clinic where he resides.
French law does not consider André a candidate for euthanasia because his condition is not bad enough. Indeed, André improves greatly in the months after his stroke but still insists that he has had enough of life. At 85, he declares that it is his will to die rather than suffer the indignities of living with the impairments of the stroke. Getting around the French authorities plunges the film briefly into farce. It makes the point that André’s wealth and society connections put him somewhat above the law. When he discusses the 100,000 Euro cost of the assisted suicide with Emmanuèlle, he wonders aloud how poor people deal with such things. “They just die,” Emmanuèlle says drily. André’s bourgeois life has sheltered him from some harsh realities – including, to an extent, the level of homophobia he may have been exposed to.
So much of what makes Ozon’s film memorable is the central performances by Sophie Marceau and André Dussollier. Marceau balances her character’s pain with her pragmatism in such an effective way that it informs almost completely how the story is rendered. Dussollier makes an unsympathetic character relatable and at times charming. The audience is caught in the hope that André will change his mind and opt to live, but there are such powerful moments where Dussollier enacts André’s lack of dignity and autonomy that we also understand his decision.
Unlike another film about euthanasia, Me Before You, there is no mordant sentimentality to Ozon’s work. That is not to say that Ozon doesn’t tackle the subject with a humanistic touch. Everything Went Fine is a greatly human film about a complex topic which is peopled by equally complex characters. It is also Ozon’s tribute to his friend who sadly did not live to see her own story adapted to the screen – one may assume she will be proud of what Ozon has achieved. Although more subdued than much of the director’s work (take for example the wonderful 8 Femmes), the smaller scale of the tale doesn’t diminish its emotional impact.
