Emmanuèle Bernheim (Sophie Marceau) is at her computer when she gets a phone call and rushes off. Her father has had a stroke and she’s going to the hospital, but as she runs from her apartment in Paris, the stairs look blurry – which reminds her to go back and put in her contact lenses. Not many filmmakers would interrupt this action for something apparently off the point. But this is how French director François Ozon works. It’s the getting to the hospital that matters, just as much as the being there. Emmanuèle has to walk a ways; she rides the subway; she walks down long halls in the hospital; she meets her sister outside.
Emmanuèle has a life, and the film is about how the many dimensions of her life connect and are affected by what happens to her father André (André Dussollier) and his needs. It’s a bad stroke. André tells his daughter that he wants to die – and he wants her to help him do it.
But nothing comes easy in 'Everything Went Fine.' Assisted suicide is not allowed in France, and French law doesn’t let someone go to Switzerland to do it. The sister has a family and André loves her and her children. He doesn’t want to die until after his grandson’s clarinet recital. Complicating matters even more is the daughters’ still-sarcastic mother (Charlotte Rampling) who is herself compromised by Parkinson’s Disease and depression, and the marriage-long conflict with André, who is gay. Both he and the mother knew this fact when they married.
Situations in 'Everything Went Fine' come with ambivalence and complication. When Emmanuèle at long last asks her mother why she put up with her husband, in spite of all the trouble he’s caused the entire family her response is simple. She loved him.
This response is no less entangled than anything else in the movie. You can sense the deep affection in André’s voice when he talks of his two daughters. Emmanuèle loves him dearly also, but she clearly remembers years ago her father’s impatient and cruel comments to her. He wasn’t a nice man then, and he’s no nicer now that he’s profoundly hampered by his stroke.
For a film about a man looking for assisted suicide because of his devastating condition, 'Everything Went Fine' is not a story that starts grim and gets grimmer. The complications in the lives of these characters are emotionally richer than just glum. A bizarre man named Gérard causes a ruckus at the hospital. The daughters have a funny, uncouth name for him, and slowly it becomes clear that he was maybe a gigolo or maybe André’s lover. It’s uncertain whether Gérard loves André or just wants his expensive Patek Phillipe watch. André also deliberately refuses to understand what his lawyer says, and he tells outlandish, obvious lies to an anti-suicide American cousin who comes to visit. This is not a humorless movie.
All of this is heightened by the intimate details of the origin of 'Everything Went Fine.' The story comes from a memoir by the actual Emmanuèle Bernheim, who before she died in 2017, was director François Ozon’s screenwriter on 'Swimming Pool' and '5x2' and his friend.
You can feel the deep intimacy of the film and its care for the reality of its situations. Lesser films show sorrow and pity, as if debilitating illness and the wish to die stand apart from the stuff of actual daily life. In 'Everything Went Fine,' the rest of life doesn’t go away because of André’s condition. It’s all there, all the time, and these characters have to figure out how to do all of it all of the time.
