Tout s’est bien passé
François Ozon (2021)
Octogenarian André (André Dussollier), a wealthy Paris art dealer, suffers a seriously debilitating stroke. He asks his daughter Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) to help him commit medically assisted suicide. Emmanuèle and her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) reluctantly agree. Everything Went Fine is divided into several chapters – beginning in mid-September one year, when André has the stroke, and ending late the following April, when he dies in Switzerland. Intervening episodes include, inter alia, his children’s first meeting with a Dignitas[1] representative (Hanna Schygulla), shortly before Christmas, and a musical recital involving Pascale’s son Raphaël (Quentin Redt-Zimmer), which takes place in early April. André’s keenness to see his grandson, a promising clarinettist, play in public means the scheduled suicide date is postponed, which raises his daughters’ hopes that their father has had a change of heart about ending his life. This soon proves to be wishful thinking. André’s mind is made up; he just wants to do a few important things – another is dinner with Emmanuèle and her partner Serge (Eric Caravaca) at a favourite restaurant – before he pulls the plug.
Everything Went Fine is François Ozon’s adaptation of the late Emmanuèle Bernheim’s memoir-cum-autobiographical novel of the same name. As well as writing novels, Bernheim worked with Ozon on the screenplays for four of his films, Under the Sand (2000), Swimming Pool (2003), 5×2 (2004) and Ricky (2009). I don’t know how much their association drew Ozon to Everything Went Fine but the result on screen has plenty of strengths. It’s a typically fluent, succinct piece of storytelling, gracefully edited by (like all Ozon’s work since Potiche (2010)), Laure Gardette. As you’d also expect from this director and despite the subject matter, the piece isn’t short of humour – thanks largely to André’s sexuality, which must also have appealed to Ozon. Although he’s still married to Claude (Charlotte Rampling), André is predominantly gay. In hospital he perks up when a handsome physiotherapist (Loris Freeman) arrives to do his work. A main attraction of the last supper’s location is one of the restaurant’s waiters (Karim Melayah). In an emergency, Serge has to look after André briefly, and makes a bad job of it. Trying and failing to support the invalid, Serge falls over with André on top of him: ‘It’s rather nice,’ muses the old man, ‘If Emmanuèle saw us …’ It’s a bonus that his ambulance drivers (Aymen Saïdi, Lamine Cissokho) for the final journey across the Swiss border are, according to André, ‘cute’.
That’s not the word to describe his grotesquely needy, middle-aged boyfriend Gérard (Grégory Gadebois) – known to André’s daughters as ‘Shithead’ – but even this character’s parting shot is funny. Earlier in the film, Gérard’s presence upsets André and he’s banned from further hospital visits but the two are eventually reconciled. As Gérard finally takes his leave of Emmanuèle and Pascale and hurries off into a lift, he can’t resist turning back to show them, with a kind of furious glee, that he’s wearing the Patek wristwatch (‘worth a fortune’ apparently) that André promised him. What’s definitely not a laughing matter is André’s marriage, either in Claude’s unsmiling presence or in the way her husband treats her. Her own health is poor (Emmanuèle tells a doctor her ‘mother has a form of Parkinson’s and has been depressed for years’) but André shows her no sympathy. When Emmanuèle asks her mother why she didn’t leave him ‘after all he put you through’, the gloomy answer is ‘I loved him’. Claude’s a sculptor and artist; in one of several flashbacks to Emmanuèle’s childhood (where she’s played by Madeleine Nosal Romane), she asks her mother a different question: ‘Why don’t you ever use colour?’ ‘Grey is a colour, darling,’ Claude replies, ‘There are so many colours in grey’. Thanks to E L James, that sentiment should nowadays be laughable but Charlotte Rampling’s delicately monochrome portrait of Claude somehow proves the truth of it.
In a generally strong cast there’s an outstanding performance from Rampling’s near contemporary Hanna Schygulla. This is the first time I’ve seen Schygulla in a new film since Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007), and she’s as great as ever. She’s only on screen a few minutes but she gives her unnamed character – in the cast list she’s simply ‘the Swiss lady’ – a calm that’s unnerving and almost mysterious yet feels hard won. This is certainly a film for seniors: the witty André Dussollier is unafraid to make André, despite his outrageous charm, dislikeable. That gives Everything Went Fine an abrasive quality which it needs. There isn’t a lot of depth in Ozon’s account of the central relationship between André and the daughter he blatantly favours. A flashback illustrates the little girl Emmanuèle’s fantasy of killing her infuriating father. Set against what he’s asking her, as a middle-aged woman, to do, the irony is too pat.
As I watched Everything Went Fine, I couldn’t help comparing it unfavourably with Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies. O’Hagan’s structure helps ensure that his characters are never submerged in the Dignitas procedure towards which the narrative leads. The novel’s first half is an account of the early friendship of the two principals – James, in his late teens, and Tully, a decade older. This is realised so vividly that when, twenty years later, Tully is terminally ill and seeks James’s help in ending his life, the substance of their relationship is already firmly rooted in the reader’s mind. The shape of Ozon’s film rules out that possibility and attenuation of the main characters tends to reduce Everything Went Fine to a dramatised how-to guide to assisting a loved one’s euthanasia. Ozon seems almost to be listing the legal and practical stumbling blocks to watch out for if you find yourself in André and Emmanuèle’s situation. It should be said that André makes life – death – more difficult for himself by telling too many people what he’s going do, including Simone (Judith Magre), an aged cousin who survived a Nazi concentration camp. She is unsurprisingly appalled by his plan and, in an attempt to thwart it, contacts the police. The climax, involving frantic, almost farce-like activity to get the Dignitas show back on the road, is oddly enjoyable, though it’s not quite clear how the last of the last-minute hitches – one of the ambulance men, a devout Muslim, decides he can’t drive André to his Swiss destination – is resolved.
It’s a strength of the film that, while you assume Ozon is sympathetic to medically assisted suicide, he doesn’t stack the deck in its favour. André, left partly paralysed by the stroke, can’t bear to continue in such reduced circumstances but his situation, at least once he’s got through the first stages of hospital treatment, isn’t so direly humiliating that the viewer is compelled to agree. As in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), another Paris-set exploration of geriatric infirmity, the characters live irreproachably cultured lives. André and Claude are both in the art world. Emmanuèle writes novels and Serge runs a cinema museum, currently organising a Buñuel retrospective. Pascale works for a classical music festival. Raphaël looks set to maintain the family’s artistic traditions. But whereas Amour was fictional, Ozon has presumably inherited these details from Emmanuèle Bernheim’s autobiographical material; in any case, his characteristic tone and disruptive elements like chaotic, unkempt Gérard give Everything Went Fine a different feel from Haneke’s admirable but culturally rarefied film. It’s a relief, too, that Ozon’s characters are somewhat aware of their privileged position. As Emmanuèle and André review the costs of the suicide project, he wonders how poor people manage this kind of thing. ‘They wait to die,’ his daughter replies.
23 June 2022
[1] Unless I missed it, the assisted dying agency isn’t named in the film but I’ll refer to it as Dignitas for convenience.