Tout S’est Bien Passé
The right to die with dignity is at the heart of this powerful and unsentimental euthanasia drama from French auteur François Ozon (Frantz, Swimming Pool).
François Ozon’s film adaptation of the memoirs of Emmanuèle Bernheim, with whom he wrote the scenarios for three of his earlier films. She has to help her terminally ill father commit euthanasia. Nominated for the Palme d’Or and the Queer Palm at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Emmanuèle’s elderly father André Bernheim is paralysed and confined to bed after a stroke. André is a cultivated, but somewhat grumpy art collector, a family man, and at the same time openly gay. Despite everything, his vitality continues to shine through his grief, but because his situation is hopeless, he asks Emmanuèle, one of his two daughters, to put him out of his misery. With all the emotional, but also practical consequences this entails: euthanasia is still forbidden in France.
Not only does Ozon use his characteristic black humour, but he is also particularly interested in the complex relationship between the stubborn André and his daughters. However, this richly varied family portrait does not lapse into melodrama. The image of the weeping daughters at the foot of the bed of their dying father is soon interrupted by flashbacks in which the father turns out to be a first-class egotist. With Ozon, people can just be people, even in the face of death. That he wastes no time in sentimentality makes the denouement all the more moving. (bw)