Old Yorker

  • Everything Went Fine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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.

  • Rosetta

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (1999)

    The dizzying, nearly relentless handheld camera in Rosetta ‘recalls the late television work of Alan Clarke:  Road, Christine, Made in Britain.   And like Clarke’s truculent heroines, Rosetta is a girl driven to desperate measures for whom one can’t help but feel a terrible sympathy’.  Richard Kelly’s comparison in Sight and Sound (February 2000) is apt enough but the young title character’s plight in the Dardenne brothers’ fourth feature also brings to mind a different landmark in 1980s British television drama, Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff.   Instead of Liverpool, the setting here is, as usual for the Dardennes, Seraing in the Belgian province of Liège – their home city.  But their heroine is asking for much the same thing as Yosser Hughes:  ‘Gizza job’ or, more specifically, secure employment.

    The film starts with Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) violently refusing to leave the factory where she recently completed a probationary period competently but has now been told she’s redundant.  She’s eventually ejected and returns home to the out-of-town caravan park – its misnomer is ‘Grand Canyon’ – where she lives with her alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux).  When she’s sober enough, the mother mends secondhand clothes for Rosetta to sell to charity shops.  She also gets cash from men who pay her for sex; her drinking and promiscuity make for a running battle with her daughter.  Seventeen-year-old Rosetta isn’t eligible for unemployment pay and refuses to receive welfare support.  She goes round town asking for work, including at a waffles bakery.  The owner (Olivier Gourmet) has no vacancies but agrees to keep her in mind if things change.  She also exchanges a few words with twenty-something Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), who works on a waffles stand in the street.  Soon after, he turns up at Grand Canyon on his moped to report that one of the outfit’s other staff has been fired.

    Rosetta returns to the bakery, persuades the boss to take her on and quickly gets the hang of things.  Efforts to persuade her mother to visit a rehab clinic are less successful:  in a physical struggle between them, Rosetta falls into the river that runs alongside the caravan park.  Instead or returning home, she goes to Riquet’s bedsit, where they eat and drink together, and she stays the night on a couch.  Before going to sleep, she has a conversation with herself:

    ‘Your name is Rosetta.  My name is Rosetta.  You found a job.  I found a job.  You’ve got a friend.  I’ve got a friend.  You have a normal life.  I have a normal life.  You won’t fall in the rut.  I won’t fall in the rut.  Goodnight.  Goodnight.’

    Next morning she arrives at the bakery to bad news.  The boss is letting her go, in favour of his son who has failed school exams and needs to get working immediately.

    I must have first seen Rosetta in the mid-noughties – in the days, that is, when I found the Dardennes’ films harder to get on with than I do now.  It was time to revisit their first Cannes Palme d’Or winner and I got much more out of it on this second viewing.  The prevailing grimness is certainly oppressive but it isn’t the misery blanket I felt it was the first time around.  The Dardennes dramatise an urgent socio-economic situation by making what they described at Cannes as a ‘war film’.  Expanding on this in the S&S interview with Richard Kelly, they refer to Rosetta’s mother as ‘a casualty, confined to camp’ and the noisy motorway that divides Grand Canyon from the town as a ‘frontier’.  The film deplores capitalism but its polemical nature doesn’t reduce the people in it to expressions of an uncompromising political agenda.  It’s likely that if this were a Ken Loach piece, for example, the man who runs the waffles business would be presented only as part of the system Rosetta is up against; the Dardennes portray him, rather, as harassed and conflicted.  He’s not unwilling to give Rosetta a leg up and appreciates that she’s good at the bakery job.  He also needs to balance the books and do the best for his son.

    Rosetta’s behaviour can’t fail to be affected by her circumstances but she’s an increasingly intriguing character.  She’s desperate to get a foothold in a society that’s, in effect, alienating and inimical to her.  But she’s averse to engaging with people, except in order to get, carry out and hold onto paid work.  Although the whispered mantra quoted above may seem key to the film, it’s not at all typical of it.  Rosetta is mostly troubled by Riquet’s friendship.  She’s startled when he first arrives at Grand Canyon with the news about the vacant job:  he has invaded her shameful territory.  When she goes to his place the tempo changes and the camerawork calms down but Rosetta, even though she’s found a kind of refuge, is uneasy  It’s Riquet who does nearly all the talking.  We get bits of his backstory – he was once a provincial gymnastics champion, he’s learning to play the drums – but none of Rosetta’s.

    She repeatedly accepts his offers of French toast and beer but literally keeps her head down, anxious to minimise eye contact.  Riquet asks her to dance to the drum track he’s recorded and she reluctantly agrees but she soon breaks away, doubled up with the period cramps we already know she suffers from.  (We saw her lying on her bed at home, using a hairdryer to warm her tummy and alleviate the pain.)  It’s shocking when Rosetta falls into the river, is sucked down by the mud and yells in vain for her mother to help:  the mother runs away, leaving Rosetta to struggle free alone.  In a later scene, Riquet comes back to the caravan park to find Rosetta laying out rudimentary fish traps to catch trout for food.  Trying to help her, he too capsizes in the river and struggles, terrified, in the mud.  Rosetta also turns away.  It’s only after some thought that she decides to yank off a tree branch and offer it to him to catch hold of.

    Riquet has already revealed to her that he’s been cheating the boss from day one.  It’s when Rosetta fails to find another job that she learns the extent of Riquet’s deception:  he’s stealing supplies to make and sell his own waffles, and invites Rosetta to join him in the business.  Instead, she reports him to the boss, who promptly throws Riquet off the stand.  This is how Rosetta gets back to earning a wage.  She also gets Riquet’s apron, with her name embroidered on it instead of his, and she makes a good job of running the stall, though she avoids eye contact with Riquet even more determinedly than before when he turns up in the waffles queue.

    BFI was showing Rosetta in its recurring ‘Big Screen Classics’ strand but this month’s selection of classic films is designed to acknowledge the wide-ranging influence of Robert Bresson, the subject of a separate, concurrent retrospective.  The Dardennes have in common with Bresson, as well as an austerity of style, a liking for using non-professional actors.  That was the case with Émilie Dequenne, when she was cast in Rosetta though it’s hardly surprising she’s gone on from it to a successful professional career.  As the Dardennes told Richard Kelly, ‘… we had to find an unknown … you can believe in Rosetta because you’re not seeing a girl who was this other character in that other movie’.   (This is true – and one’s all the more grateful for it seeing Rosetta immediately after Judgment at Nuremberg!)  Dequenne (who shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes) is truly remarkable:  as well as immersing herself in a physically demanding role, she’s able to be emotionally raw even while Rosetta is closed off.  She’s excellently supported by Olivier Gourmet and by Fabrizio Rongione as the edgy, eager Riquet.

    After Rosetta locks up the waffles van for the day, Riquet follows her on his moped and, when he catches up, grabs hold of her, demanding to know why she shopped him and lost him his job.  She truthfully answers that she wanted it for herself, adding that, when he fell in the river, ‘I didn’t want you out’.  Before letting her go, he shouts back, ‘You helped me anyway!’   This unexpected reply anticipates the film’s conclusion, which is powerfully unsentimental but not devoid of hope.  Back in Grand Canyon, Rosetta finds her mother drunk and practically unconscious outside their caravan.  She drags her on and puts her to bed.  Rosetta then hard boils an egg, goes out to a payphone to tell the boss she won’t be coming back to work, seals the entrances to the caravan, and turns on the gas.  She eats her egg and lies down on her bed.  The gas runs out before it can do its work.  She gets up and goes to the caravan park manager (Bernard Marbaix) to buy a new gas canister, which she starts to lug back with effort and in great distress.  She’s conscious of a whining sound, getting louder and which she and we instantly recognise.  Riquet’s moped has always been a high-volume droning insect; in the later stages, as he continues to pursue Rosetta, its noise is increasingly insistent.  At its most menacing in this closing scene, it also signifies, in a more positive sense, that Riquet won’t go away.  He and the vehicle circle Rosetta, who collapses to the ground weeping.  Riquet gets off his moped to help and hold her up.  She finally looks him in the face.

    22 June 2022

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