Loving French director Francois Ozon as I do, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he could transform a seemingly depressing premise about an elderly stroke victim who demands his daughters find a way for him to end his life into something so exhilarating and affecting. And affords the supremely talented actress Sophie Marceau a chance to dazzle on the screen with a ferocious, poignant, heart-felt performance.
Based on the achingly autobiographical novel by Emmanuelle Bernheim (who wrote the screenplay for Ozon’s masterful Swimming Pool), the film begins with 85-year-old Andre (played by great French character actor Andre Dussollier) raced to an emergency room after suffering a massive stroke. His daughters rush to his side- Emmanuelle (Sophie Marceau), a successful novelist and her married sister and mother Pascale (Geraldine Paihas).
Their stony, chilly mother shows up at the hospital (played by the extraordinary Charlotte Rampling). She was once a renowned sculptor, but, felled by Parkinson’s disease, she is now a walking cloud of misery and self-pity and has little time for other people’s grief. “Your father doesn’t look that bad,” she says and can’t get out of the hospital fast enough.
It’s up to Emmanuele to deal with her dad, and flashbacks reveal a thorny, privileged upbringing with eccentric, bohemian parents who were far from nurturing. As Andre gets better he demands that that she find a way for him to die with dignity. At first she is horrified, and her sister adamantly opposes this, but, as she says to anyone who will listen, when her father has made up his mind nothing can change it.
Dussollier’s performance is astonishing. Not only the physicality of playing a stroke victim, but, as he improves, revealing a truly eccentric, offbeat character. But what hell to have been your father. Emmanuelle has risen from those damaged childhood ashes and is now an acclaimed novelist living with a sympathetic partner Serge (Eric Caravaca). Andre makes it a point that he doesn’t want to be buried anywhere near his wife’s parents, who, he said, objected to their daughter marrying a homosexual. And Emmanuelle alarmingly sees a former boyfriend of her father slinking around the hospital, a man she and her sister both despise.
As Andre improves the sisters pray he will forget all about it, but he does not and Emmanuelle is forced to contact a woman that works for a Swiss organization that facilitates this kind of euthanasia. She’s played by the luminous Hanna Schugulla, who takes the sisters through the complex steps on how to transport him out of the country without getting arrested. The cost is astronomical and Andre grouses, “How do poor people manage?” to which his daughter tartly replies, “They wait to die.”
Not to say that the film is without some pretty devastating and heartbreaking moments, but there is such humor and intelligence coursing through it. The miracle is that this beautifully observed film never resorts to mawkish sentimentality or unearned pathos. There’s something life-affirming about that.
Everything Went Fine opens April 14 (Quad Cinema) in NY.
An articulate and deeply felt review, Mr. Dermody.
Flavian