Everything Went Fine: A French Family Grapples With Assisted Suicide in a Film That Avoids Melodrama
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus.
Everything Went Fine (Tout s’est bien passé) is French writer/director François Ozon’s subtle family drama, built, among other things, around the legal issue of the right to die.
The film, which debuted in competition at last year's Cannes Film Festival, centers on Emmanuèle Bernheim, (Sophie Marceau) a successful author getting set to write her next book.
Sophie Marceau, Géraldine Pailhas and André Dussollier in Everything Went Fine
As it opens, 85-year-old André Bermheim (André Dussollier) wakes up in the hospital after a stroke. His daughters, Pascale, (Géraldine Pailhas) and Emmanuèle rush to the hospital. He’s partially paralyzed, but the prognosis for recovery is good. He’s in a room with a man who has almost fully recovered from his stroke and who intrudes on the family circle to try and assure them that things will be fine.
But André is not interested. He asks his daughters to arrange for him to end his life.
Over the next few months, as he recovers, we get a sense of the family dynamics. André is strong willed and self-centered. He prefers one daughter over the other, even though it seems he was sometimes cruel to her when she was a child, to the extent that it may have caused an eating disorder.
He indulges one grandchild, and when the other is asked if she wants to see him, she waves the suggestion off, cheerily noting that she doesn’t really show up on his radar so it’s no big deal. He is separated from his wife, Claude (Charlotte Rampling) and he treats her coldly, without seeming to notice how his behaviour affects all of them.
He’s vain and demanding, but also charming and connected to his daughters. He’s also a man with secrets.
Still the family bonds are strong. The daughters, especially Emmanuèle, attend to him, and assure him they’ll help him end his life, while hoping he’ll change his mind as his recovery progresses. Still, she does her research on the subject to find a way for him to do what he insists he wants to do.
The film is based on a biographical novel by the late Emmanuèle Bernheim, who collaborated with director Ozon on scripts for several of his films.
Although the subject matter is serious, Ozon has directed here with a light hand and a cool and distant eye. He’s completely avoided melodrama, focusing on people going through their lives day to day.
Thanks to his accomplished cast, and sophisticated approach, the emotions are there, but they don’t overwhelm the story.
As a result, Ozon gives us an introspective film that looks at family dynamics and bonds, aging, and without judgment looks at the thorny questions about who gets to decide when life is not worth living and other issues that come with the right to die. The result is a film that doesn’t draw conclusions for us, but leaves us to answer those questions for ourselves.
Everything Went Fine (Tout s’est bien passé). Directed by François Ozon, written by François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, based on the novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim, Starring Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas, Charlotte Rampling. In theatres now.