Everything Went Fine (2021)

Low-key but tender-hearted euthanasia drama - Everything Went Fine review by PD

Early on in Ozon's tender-hearted but unsentimental film, ailing 85-year-old André asks, or more accurately intsructs, his daughter Emmanuèle to help him end his life. After a brief period of understandable panic, she takes the assignment more or less in stride, give or take the odd cry behind closed bathroom doors. “Why would your father ask this of his daughter?” her bewildered husband asks her in bed one night. “That’s why, because I’m his daughter,” she replies, seemingly amazed he has to ask. Thus the film effectively divides the world into people who understand this and people who don’t, while remaining sympathetic to all parties.

Adapted from Emmanuèle Bernheim’s memoir of her father’s death, this elegantly written, persuasively performed drama finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in his plainest, most pragmatic gear as a filmmaker. The results are cinematically distinctly low-key, but a tony cast of familiar faces, led by a terrific Sophie Marceau and André Dussollier as father and daughter. But the film is not especially interested in stoking the debate and controversy that tend to trail films on this thorny topic; the ethics of assisted suicide are not being relitigated here, even as André’s friends and family express more personal reservations over this stubbornly determined strategy. If André isn’t fighting for his life, following a severe stroke that has left him hospitalised for months, Emmanuèle isn’t fighting over it. What ensues is more a tricky period of negotiation, heavy on the practicalities of ending a life in a country where such things remain illegal, and revealing in the process a fair bit of gallows humour amid the heavier emotional labour. Complicated family baggage also emerges in the process, though Ozon doesn’t treat any of it — particularly conflicts related to the dying man’s sexuality — as a mystery to be solved. Instead, he simply trusts his audience to intuit what the characters have long wearied of talking about.

Indeed, as a film about death, the film is as grown-up and (largely) as detached as André would like the whole ordeal to be, beginning with the brisk irony of the title. But life inevitably throws up messier emotional barriers to the best (or worst) laid plans: No man is an island, and no man, it turns out, can die on one either. “In the end, they usually choose life,” a doctor calmly shrugs in response to Emmanuèle; she and her younger sister Pascale aren’t quite as willing to airily hope that their father’s death wish is a passing phase; how much they’d miss him if he went through with it is another of the film’s pleasing points of ambiguity. André, a proponent of tough love in their childhood, has in turn remained hard to love throughout their lives. In a handful of tart, terse flashbacks to Emmanuèle’s teen years, he’s brusque and occasionally verbally abusive toward her. According to Pascale — tellingly never present in any of these brief, jarring jumps back in time — that still counts as more attention than she ever received. “He’s not interested in girls,” Pascale’s own teen daughter remarks flatly when asked why she won’t visit him in hospital: Time and grandfatherhood, it seems, haven’t softened him. That André chose only one daughter to burden with his request is a running source of flinty tension between two otherwise lovingly supportive sisters: Perhaps, Pascale somewhat acidly suggests, Emmanuèle should see it as a gift. But we are given a reminder, too, of the relative comfort in which this plushly bourgeois, culturally discerning family gets to sort out this crisis, for The Swiss clinic where André wishes to end it all will charge €10,000 for the privilege, and the money, at least, is not among this brood’s various issues. “I wonder how poor people do it,” André muses. “They wait to die,” his daughter lightly snaps. It’s an exchange typical of Ozon’s smart, measured but still deeply human take on a delicate subject.