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Everything Went Fine (François Ozon, 2021)
🕑 Added 2022-03-13 21:46:28 +0000 UTC
It's fairly obvious that Ozon's rebellious days are behind him. We won't be getting another Sitcom or Water Drops on Burning Rocks from him; the best we can hope for are solid, reasonably affecting entries along the lines of Under the Sand, Time to Leave, or last year's Summer of '85. Everything Went Fine falls squarely into that category. It's hand-tooled for vacuuming up César awards, and like Ozon's last few productions, it's based on a true story. Emmanuèle Bernheim's memoir about her father's assisted suicide appears to have been adapted with a minimum of deviation and very little stylistic fuss.
In fact, Everything Went Fine is a model of French urbanity and bourgeois worldliness. It focuses, as you might expect, on Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau), who has been elected by her father André (André Dussollier) to make the arrangements so that he can circumvent France's legal system and sneak off to Switzerland, taking advantage of their right-to-die laws. The resulting film is far more procedural than emotive, partly because a couple of key flashbacks make it evident that Emmanuèle and her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) had a rather chilly relationship with the old man.
These flashbacks to childhood, however, are a bit of a formal stumble. Much of Everything Went Fine is mounted with admirable restraint, with family secrets and old grievances coming to light only gradually and indirectly. For example, we can clearly see that there is no love lost between André, an art dealer, and his sculptor ex-wife (Charlotte Rampling). But we are well into the third act before it becomes evident that André was a gay-leaning bisexual who cheated on his wife with a variety of men, and actually fell in love with one of them, a fellow the sisters refer to as Shithead (Grégory Gadebois). So scenes with the younger André upbraiding young Emmanuèle seem superfluous. We can see the rough waters under the bridge.
Moments of clumsiness mar a film that is otherwise agreeable middlebrow update of Who's Life Is It Anyway? The overall temperature of Everything Went Fine suggests that Ozon has found a "mature" kind of directorial sweet spot, relying on some of France's best actors to dramatize suitably adult topics in a sophisticated but unobtrusive manner. And I say this as someone who found himself uncomfortably close to being Ozon's ideal viewer. Like André, my father suffered a debilitating stroke eleven years ago. Like Dussollier's character, my father has slurred speech, Bell's palsy, and a paralyzed right arm. Unlike André Bernheim, however, my father has been determined to soldier on through life, partly because of his Catholic faith, but also because of his commitment to being in my son's life.
I'm rather sensitive to able-bodied people's performances of the disabled. (One of these days I need to rewatch The Turin Horse, a film whose awkward, unrealistic depiction of paralysis continually broke my concentration on Tarr's aesthetic intent.) Dussollier is so convincing, a began to wonder whether Novocaine was involved. But for the most part, Everything Went Fine offered a look at a very different individual, one with cultural investments miles away from those of my father. There is something cavalier about the way André chooses death over physical adversity, and this may well be Ozon's point. Being noble is not a requirement for having control of one's own destiny. André may well have been a bit of a bastard, but it doesn't matter. There can be no ethical means-testing for basic freedom.
