Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas, Charlotte Rampling
A daughter decides how to help her father end his life in François Ozon’s highly acclaimed latest, a thoughtful, understated, beautifully performed drama adapted from his longtime collaborator Emmanuèle Bernheim’s memoir.
When 85-year-old André (André Dussollier) has a stroke, his daughter Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) hurries to see him in hospital. Sick and half-paralysed, he asks Emmanuèle to help organise the end of his life. But how should she go about it?
Rather than agonising about the ethics of the situation, Ozon’s briskly unsentimental but tremendously tender film is interested more in its practical aspects. How will André’s death be achieved legally, and (as he in particular worries) will it be a rip-off? Life keeps intruding on the whole thing, and into his and Emmanuèle’s conversations, illuminating the difficulties of their past relationship and the subsequent weight of his request. Smart, measured, and wrenching in part precisely because of its restraint, Everything Went Fine is a candid, finely wrought and very affecting study of complicated family ties and the realities of assisted dying.
