Everything Went Fine is a French film written and directed by François Ozon. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Emmanuèle Bernheim, narrating her own story with her father who asked her to help him die. It was presented and selected for the official competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Emmanuèle is a fulfilled and accomplished novelist, in both her personal and professional life. One day, she receives an urgent call: her father André, 85 years old, has been hospitalized following a stroke. When he awakens, diminished and dependent, this curious and life-loving man asks his daughter to help him die. Despite their past differences, the father turns to her rather than his other daughter, Pascale, who doesn’t take it well.
François Ozon has not lost his edge with this film about the end of life. An obviously sensitive subject that François Ozon decides to address in the simplest way, that of a story full of love and misunderstanding.
“I don’t want any wailers!” he commands his relatives through the words of André Dussollier, impeccable in the very challenging role of this iconoclastic father, as selfish and perverse as he is elegant and mischievous.
And Ozon makes this line the declaration of intent for his film. Because if the societal subject of euthanasia can be frightening, the director of “By the Grace of God” turns this diary of a condemned man, a plea for freedom, into a frantic race against time and prejudice. A vaudevillian score for a drama set in a day hospital and bourgeois apartment, never complacent but whose classicism might cool some. Ozon, as kamikaze and modest as his anti-hero, prefers to laugh rather than cry…
“How do poor people manage?” laments Dussollier upon discovering the cost of assisted death in Switzerland. And his daughter responds tersely, ironically: “Well, they wait for death.”
The film’s great strength lies in its distance and extreme neutrality. Sophie Marceau has rarely been as accurate opposite an André Dussollier who is simply outstanding.
