Based on Emmanuèle Bernheim’s book about helping her elderly father commit euthanasia, Everything Went Fine finds François Ozon working again in the mode of the social-message drama. As in 2019’s By the Grace of God, his dramatization of the child sexual abuse scandal that rocked the French Catholic Church, Ozon’s latest is an elegant, classically humanist illustration of another percolating controversy in French society. Everything Went Fine is an openly, almost assertively bourgeois drama that wears its politics on its business-casual sleeves but can in no way be mistaken for a polemic.
The film opens with Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) receiving a phone call informing her that her father, André (André Dussollier), has had a stroke. Rushing down the stairs of her apartment building to get to the hospital, she realizes that her vision is blurry and that she’s forgotten her contact lenses. Everything Went Fine doesn’t lack for such minutely observed details as the point-of-view shot of Emmanuèle popping her contacts into her eyes in such a rush that they fold up uncomfortably onto her eyeballs. Later, when André is visited by his grandson, Ozon gives us a close-up of the man’s left hand, rendered useless by the stroke. During this infinitesimally brief stretch of the scene, we share the boy’s juvenile fascination and suppressed, barely comprehending confrontation with mortality. In such moments, the film ably captures how an impending death means something different to each family member, that everybody focuses on something different as the dying person slips away.
One of the unspoken but clearly signaled currents running through Everything Went Fine is the way that André’s end-of-life crisis accentuates Emmanuèle’s awareness of her own advancing age, as hinted at by the opening scene depicting her blurry vision. More than once, scenes open with the toned Emmanuèle in the midst of a work-out—running, swimming, boxing—to the point that her intense exercise regime comes to suggest an attempt on her part to stave off the inevitability of aging and death. But this implicit fear of mortality has deeper roots than what happens to her father at the start of the story, as her mother, Claude (Charlotte Rampling), has been suffering with Parkinson’s disease and depression for some time, and hers is an oppressive presence that the family treats with a fair amount of aversion.
Claude ends up serving mostly as a foil to André rather than as a multi-dimensional character in her own right. In part, this exists to mirror Emmanuèle and her sister Pascale’s (Géraldine Pailhas) own complicated relationship, but it also means that Claude is presented as an object of offhand pity, made pathetic by her ailments and the fact that she has been married for decades to an openly gay man. And whereas Claude has suffered with a slowly progressing but terminal illness for decades, André has decided to “die with dignity.” He asks—or, rather, demands—that Emannuèle make arrangements for him to be brought to Switzerland, where his assisted suicide would be allowed. Emmanuèle balks at first, but gradually relents as her father stays fast in his determination, and even throws some fits when she refuses to discuss the matter. As she will later explain to others, “We can’t refuse our father anything.”
The film proceeds at a quick clip but, impressively, doesn’t feel like it’s sacrificing time with the characters in favor of plot. Ozon precisely chooses and arranges emblematic moments that stand in for longer periods of time and contribute to a sense that we know these individuals. An impressive ensemble of actors, which includes Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest muse, Hanna Schygulla, as a German-Swiss self-euthanasia advocate who gives off the slightest amount of dubious vibes, also helps. When the film cuts to Emmanuèle nursing a glass of neat whisky alone at a bar, Marceau’s loose grip and distant gaze tell us that she’s been sitting there for at least long enough to give this situation a few good think-throughs.
As finely crafted as Everything Went Fine is, its almost procedural run-through of how one would go about smuggling an octogenarian out of France for an assisted-suicide appointment tends toward the heavy-handed. Sometimes, too, Ozon’s clear decision to avoid the most dramatic potential story developments gives the film a feeling of complacency, particularly when it comes to the privileges of the upper class to which his characters belong. In the end, it’s true, everything goes fine, including an encounter with the French police that will probably look like it takes place on an alien world to people living under a certain income bracket.
Though it can be unsparing regarding the ways a stroke can ravage a body and possesses true insight into the process of saying goodbye to a family member, there remains a sense that Everything Went Fine is such a precisely tuned social drama that it has tuned out some of the messier parts of its characters’ reality. This may be a highly effective way of making an argument—and making it to the people in France who probably wield enough power to do something about the issue at hand—but it gives the whole a bit of a manufactured, even glib quality. If only everyone could say with such breezy self-irony that everything went fine.
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