Everything Went Fine

The crisis in "Everything Went Fine" begins in the first moment. Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) sits at a table in her apartment, working. The phone rings. She listens to the caller, whom we don't hear. She asks, "When? Where?" and then promptly races out the door. Her father has had a stroke, and the caller is her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas), who is waiting at the hospital. The sisters hasten to ICU to check on him. The urgency and crisis leave no room for what you'd call backstory. Instead, we are left to assemble who is who, what is what, and what might be happening. This approach is extremely effective and gives the film, directed by the prolific and versatile François Ozon, a sense of realism, of high stakes but a human-sized situation. Based on the autobiographical book Everything Went Well by the late Emmanuèle Bernheim (a frequent Ozon collaborator), "Everything Went Fine" is an emotional and complex portrait of a family in crisis, the father's stroke exposing underlying cracks, old pains, new anxieties.

Emmanuèle and Pascale have a close relationship, complete with conversations held via ESP (one glance is an entire conversation, no words necessary), but sparked with resentments dating from childhood. Pascale is raising two children, and Emmanuèle is a novelist, married to Serge (a film curator, busy planning a Luis Buñuel festival). André, their elderly father, played by André Dussollier (a familiar face), now paralyzed on one side, is cantankerous and unpredictable in his illness. Judging from a couple of flashbacks, impressionistically presented in the way fragments of memory operate, he was a volatile, mean, and self-absorbed dad. ("He was a bad father," says Emmanuèle, "but I love him.") Their mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, was a sculptor before arthritis and Parkinson's ruined her hands. She suffered from debilitating depression her whole life and is a peripheral yet important figure, the decades of anguish etched into her face, shadowing her eyes. The sisters are in charge of their father's recovery.

Things take a turn when André requests that Emmanuèle help him die. Emmanuèle, who got the brunt of his cruel comments growing up, feels an obligation, so she makes inquiries. It's a dangerous proposition. He would need to be transported to Switzerland for the "right to die with dignity." Emmanuèle contacts a retired doctor who works at a clinic in Switzerland, and this doctor (played by the great Hanna Schygulla) lays out the options. What started with fairly standard family-illness drama swerves into something entirely different.

Emmanuèle Bernheim died in 2017. She was the child of well-to-do artistic parents, an art collector father, and a sculptress mother (reflected in the film adaptation). A prize-winning novelist, she also wrote multiple screenplays with Ozon—"Under the Sand" (2000), "Swimming Pool" (2003), "5x2" (2004), and "Ricky" (2009). Claire Denis adapted her novel "Friday Night" into a film (2002) starring Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon. Bernheim also wrote for television. Her work is dense and rich, filled with human details, all of which can be seen and felt in the films she wrote. The details in "Everything Went Fine" have the unmistakable ring of reality. These details don't lead anywhere earth-shattering—like the salmon sandwich with a bite out of it, like Emmanuèle's contact lenses, like the Buñuel festival—but feel very real, the things you notice when life gets intense when everything shifts. There's a certain kind of clarity that comes. Things show up in juxtaposition, almost like life itself becomes a literary conceit. These elements don't scream "Symbols!" but feel, instead, like the texture of life as it is lived.