![]() ![]() The details in "Everything Went Fine" have the unmistakable ring of reality. Her work is dense and rich, filled with human details, all of which can be seen and felt in the films she wrote. Claire Denis adapted her novel "Friday Night" into a film (2002) starring Valérie Lemercier and Vincent Lindon. ![]() A prize-winning novelist, she also wrote multiple screenplays with Ozon-"Under the Sand" (2000), " Swimming Pool" (2003), "5x2" (2004), and " Ricky" (2009). She was the child of well-to-do artistic parents, an art collector father, and a sculptress mother (reflected in the film adaptation). What started with fairly standard family-illness drama swerves into something entirely different.Įmmanuèle Bernheim died in 2017. 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. ![]() Emmanuèle, who got the brunt of his cruel comments growing up, feels an obligation, so she makes inquiries. Things take a turn when André requests that Emmanuèle help him die. The sisters are in charge of their father's recovery. 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. ("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. Judging from a couple of flashbacks, impressionistically presented in the way fragments of memory operate, he was a volatile, mean, and self-absorbed dad. André, their elderly father, played by André Dussollier (a familiar face), now paralyzed on one side, is cantankerous and unpredictable in his illness. Pascale is raising two children, and Emmanuèle is a novelist, married to Serge (a film curator, busy planning a Luis Buñuel festival). 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.Įmmanuèle 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. 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. Instead, we are left to assemble who is who, what is what, and what might be happening. The urgency and crisis leave no room for what you'd call backstory. The sisters hasten to ICU to check on him. Her father has had a stroke, and the caller is her sister Pascale ( Géraldine Pailhas), who is waiting at the hospital. She asks, "When? Where?" and then promptly races out the door. She listens to the caller, whom we don't hear. Emmanuèle ( Sophie Marceau) sits at a table in her apartment, working. Suddenly, Vivian is talking people away from the ledge, and strangely enough, they’re responding to her chaotic, nihilistic brand of psychology.The crisis in "Everything Went Fine" begins in the first moment. Last week she accidentally burnt down her brother’s food truck, and this week she’s inherited her grandfather’s house on the edge of a cliff face.Soon, Vivian realizes that the waterfront shack she’s inherited isn’t just a home – it’s a known suicide site, and her grandfather used to try and save every lost soul that passed through. She can’t pay her bills, she’s living in a decrepit share house, and she likes alcohol more than she likes herself. Twenty-something Vivian's life is in free fall. The official series synopsis reads as follows: Vivian learning to talk down the troubled people who approach the cliff's edge depicts how anyone can have their own personal demons and that it's necessary to reach out and be kind. Yet, it speaks volumes that these individual dilemmas are almost universal and can connect us in ways that could remedy us. With Vivian's life in a nosedive, tense relationships with her family, and unresolved grief regarding her grandfather, it's a fragile melting pot of concerns that would point to depression and anxiety. ![]()
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