Everything went well: François Ozon’s drama divides [critique]

With Everything went well, adapted from the book by Emmnuèle Bernheim, François Ozon signs a film about the end of life with André Dussollier and Sophie Marceau. Sublime or academic? Clear opinions.

France 2 takes advantage of the theatrical release of When autumn comes to broadcast Everything went wellone of the latest achievements of François Ozon. A drama which deeply divided the editorial staff during its screening in Cannes in May 2021.

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Emmanuelle Bernheim and François Ozon knew each other well. Disappeared on May 10, 2017, she had signed or co-signed the script for four of the director’s films: Under the sand, Swimming pool (presented in competition in Cannes in 2003), 5X2 et Ricky. But adapt Everything went very well, an intimate and painful story dedicated to the end of life of his collector father after a stroke (published in 2013 by Gallimard and which Alain Cavalier was to bring to the screen before the illness overtook him). author who had to play her own role, as he recounted in his documentary To be alive and to know it) was nothing like a long, quiet river. Firstly because when approaching the subject of the right to die with dignity, there is a great risk of falling into a pure film about the subject, with the fiery Dossiers de l’école atmosphere. And then because knowing so well the one who recounted here such a painful part of her existence, there was the temptation to go with the handbrake, not to work on what any good adaptation requires: betrayal

Everything went well quickly sweeps away these two concerns. We have known since Thanks to God Ozon’s ability to take on a strong social subject without making it a purely societal film, by finding an angle (in this case, focusing on the point of view of the victims and hold on to it). Ozon uses it here in the same way by daring to accompany the clinical description of this man’s desire to put an end to his existence before being totally diminished as well as the difficulty for his daughters to accept the news and then to strive to respect his wishes in Switzerland through a triviality or even humor that arises unexpectedly. Ozon is not Haneke, we heard yesterday from the film’s detractors, at the end of the press screening. Indeed, no and that is rather good news. Because there are necessarily a thousand and one ways to tell this story. And that precisely trying to follow in the footsteps ofAmour would have been the worst idea ever.

Here, Ozon first and foremost brings two sides of his cinema into dialogue: the emotional power of a Under the sand and the willingly provocative bratty appearance of a Sitcom. The clash of opposites. And this chronicle of a foretold death becomes precisely fascinating because it refuses to lock the viewer into an emotional hostage-taking and dares to go off the road, the moments of embarrassment, the off-beat laughter. Life invades this story and distances it from any deadly temptation.

And this work is reflected in all the finesse of his direction of actors. Staging Sophie Marceau after several failed attempts, he does not lock her into a role at the Tchao Pantin as if to mark with a stabylo the difference between his usual uses. On the contrary, he knows how to use this insane naturalness which has created this unwavering bond with the French public since The Boom to peacefully lead him into nuances not yet explored. And above all he has the intelligence not to make her the center of the plot. First of all, by associating as much as possible the character of Emmanuelle Bernheim that she portrays with that of her sister, interpreted with equal accuracy by Géraldine Pailhas. But above all by making the father the symbolic character of this film who is never afraid to wander into the realm of farce.

In his career, André Dussollier has rarely had the opportunity to tackle purely compositional roles. Those where you have to let go, break through the armor, not be afraid of ridicule, not retreat into the ease of pure emotion without anything or almost nothing sticking out. To say that he is engaged here in a race for prizes (Cannes or César) would be an insult to him as he has already been able to savor these rewards in large numbers. But that would also amount to denying a whole part of an actor’s work. The one that we so often celebrate when it comes to Anglo-Saxons but which we look at with holding our noses and often with great ironic disdain when it comes to French people. Dussollier is astonishing in his excess, in the finesse that he is capable of distilling to transcend the obligatory and heavy physical attributes of such a character (prosthesis, etc.). He does a great off-piste skiing act and takes the film exactly where Ozon seems to want to put it. In a place that is anything but enveloping and relaxing but disturbing and even uncomfortable which does not precisely obey any pre-established rule. Exactly what those who were confronted with an identical tragedy felt in their flesh

Thierry Cheze

Against

With the sparsely distributed releases of films around the end of life (Falling, The Father…, while waiting to discover here the Vortex by Gaspar Noé), we end up wondering if the filmmakers are not trying to tell us something. Would their respective specters herald an apocalypse? This is not new. From its birth, cinema was immediately perceived as an old lady who would soon die out. And what has been seen on the big screens for almost 120 years is only a slow agony. Everything went well François Ozon reassures us today, the much-desired death came without pain. The groans of the old man (André Dussollier, face distorted as if on parade and the shocked delivery of the tortured person in the mode: “ Jury, my good Jury, look, everything is there! »), are just appetizers before erasure.

« Well gone » therefore, like the staging of a filmmaker of exemplary wisdom, who from film to film tries to stain his own carpet but ultimately ends up cleaning everything behind him. This cinema, painless, flat, is easy to fit into and does not support diligent rereading since everything is said and shown without ever hiding anything (Thanks to God is no exception). So, once the surprise effect of seeing a close-up of Dussollier playing bedridden has passed, what can we expect other than to detect, here and there, in an eye that borders on a quickly repressed desire to have fun with us? At its bedside, high-end French cinema (Marceau – Pailhas) feigns embarrassment but remains in the programmed role of a bourgeois caste that we are grateful for not playing bohemian.

We would like all these films, which are all a bit similar, to be the simulacrum of their own funeral. It is obviously the opposite. They show resistance, clinging to the big strings of an academism that has always been acclaimed (Oscars, César…) Chance and spatio-temporal fault, in the middle of this elite, an unpublished work by George A. Romero, The Amusement Parkwas invited to the banquet last month. Through the ordeal of an old man trapped in an amusement park, the father of the living dead, now deceased, demonstrated that talking about old age does not exclude the modernity of the gesture.

Thomas Baurez

François Ozon: “Women aged 70/80 are invisible” [interview vidéo]