This François Ozon film was released in the UK in June 2022 and is currently available on BBC iPlayer in the UK for the next couple of weeks. It’s a narrative adapted from a biographical account by the writer Emmanuèle Bernheim. She died in 2017, but back in the 2000s she worked with François Ozon on a number of his film scripts and Ozon read her book before her death. She can also be connected to films by Catherine Corsini and Claire Denis. In Ozon’s film, Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) is a writer whose partner is Serge Toubiana, a film critic who at one time was the manager of the Cinémathèque Française (played here by Éric Caravaca). Emmanuèle receives a message that her 85 year-old father André (André Dussollier) has had a stroke. He recovers in hospital but then stuns his daughter by requesting that she help him to die. André is an art collector and a a complicated prickly character who has treated his family and friends quite badly at times but is nevertheless loved by his two daughters.
Emmanuèle is the elder of the daughters. She is close to her younger sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) who has two children. She is also her father’s favourite. Assisted dying is not legal in France and if she is to fulfil her father’s wishes, Emmanuèle must pursue the Swiss option. This she does in a careful methodical way, fitting it in with her writing and visits to the gym. But André is not necessarily an easy character to work with. He recovers well from his treatment but his voice is weak and he needs a wheel chair. He is separated from his wife Claude (Charlotte Rampling), a sculptor. She has Parkinson’s disease and seems to some extent estranged from her daughters as well as her husband, but is supported by a live-in carer. There is a cousin of André’s in America who makes an appearance later and a former lover, Gérard (Grégory Gadebois) whose presence disturbs the family. Her father’s attraction to men was seemingly an important part of the marriage breakdown. He has a desire to project his own sense of a rich cultural life through his grandson who is learning music. André is invited to a recital. The final key member of the cast is the Swiss contact for the clinic in Berne, who is not named but who is played by Hanna Schygulla. She looks so different these days and at first I didn’t recognise her, although I was aware that I knew her. She still has enormous presence and is well cast here.
Inevitably, much of the narrative takes place in hospital/clinic rooms. At first André is in a hospital room with another patient, a rather more amenable man who tolerates his tetchy fellow patient. But after his initial treatment André is moved to a clinic for his long-term recovery. I confess that in the early stages of this narrative I wasn’t sure I could cope with the trajectory it was taking. However, I persevered, partly because I enjoyed Sophie Marceau’s performance, but also because I began to wonder how André Dussollier felt about acting in such a role. I won’t spoil any more of the narrative, only remark that the middle of the film involves a form of family melodrama and the finale, bizarrely perhaps, something akin to a chase sequence. Ozon is a skilled filmmaker and he paces the film well across 113 minutes. Along the way we learn about the procedures of the Swiss clinic in Berne and the state of the law in France. There is that sense that bureaucracy can make things more difficult for everyone even if the intention is to protect everyone’s interests.
I followed my usual procedure with this film and sought out the Press Pack. The film was screened in competition at Cannes and the French distributor Diaphana has the Pack on its website. I usually find Packs via Unifrance. I rely on Google Translate because I would struggle to translate quite long documents. In this case the whole project appears almost like a family story as seen by Ozon who seems to know all the actors as well as most of the ‘real’ characters in the story. For instance, he has known Sophie Marceau for a long time, wanting to work with her but not finding the right property at the right time. She had followed his films including his early film with Charlotte Rampling, Sous le sable (Under the Sand, France 2000) which I think is when I first became interested in his work. The result is that Ozon seems to conflate Emmanuèle as the daughter of Claude with his own sense of Marceau in relation to Rampling. It’s an almost incestuous kind of world where everyone is interconnected. This could be mean that the whole project becomes rather precious but I don’t think that happens. Ozon is a prolific director who has made around twenty-five features in thirty years plus many shorts as a young director. He has made great comedies alongside sensitive romances and sometimes quite outrageous thrillers. The appearance of Hanna Schygulla in this film points towards his takes on the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the Press Notes for this film he reveals both a cool detachment about a civilised society that doesn’t allow a dignified personal choice about death but also an emotional concern for all the participants in his melodrama.
I’m not sure this is Friday night entertainment, but it is very well directed and very well acted and certainly provides something to think about. Ozon manages to avoid the real pitfalls in dealing with this subject. He is also able to balance some of rather hurtful comments that André is prone to make with moments of gentle humour. As I write this the Isle of Man is voting on whether to become the first part of the British Isles to allow assisted dying and some British campaigners are in Canada protesting about the attempts to extend existing legislation in its favour. So this is a timely film, though it does not necessarily take sides. Rather it tells a real story in a humanist way.
itp Global Film 