Everything Went Fine, review: Sophie Marceau’s assisted-suicide drama pulls its punches

It’s often said there is a dignity in dying at the time of one’s own choosing – though if the new film from Fran?ois Ozon is anything to go by, the admin is another matter. The prolific French director has returned with this clear-eyed, handsomely constructed drama about the emotionally and ethically taxing business of arranging a relative’s assisted suicide, with a welcome juicy leading role for Sophie Marceau.

It was adapted by Ozon from a 2013 memoir by Emmanuèle Bernheim, the late novelist and screenwriter who worked on a number of his scripts including Swimming Pool. Marceau plays Bernheim, and André Dussolier her father André, an 85-year-old art collector who is hospitalised with a stroke as the film begins.

The old man’s condition is bad enough to startle Emmanuèle and her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas): like Ozon’s camera, they fixate on the ghoulish droop of the old man’s mouth and right eyelid. But while the situation looks grim, it doesn’t appear irrevocably bleak. So Emmanuèle is shocked when her father grabs her arm during a visit and implores her three times to help him “end it” as soon as logistically possible.

At first she looks into it just to humour him, while gently reminding him of forthcoming exhibitions and other things to live for, but he only becomes more resolute, and the plan gathers momentum, leading to a lightly suspenseful, gallows-humoured caper in which the necessary arrangements must be made under the noses of her father’s carers. Because of the funds and time required, it is by necessity a story of privilege: “I wonder how poor people do it?” André wonders aloud, to which Emmanuèle replies with a shrug: “They wait to die.”

André is an old-school upper-crust egomaniac, and a deliberately exasperating presence. Dussolier delivers his dialogue in a lofty, self-amused wheeze that’s regularly punctuated with private chuckling over the perceived foibles of the little people he’s unfortunately obliged to deal with – and you sense he often includes his daughters in this group. As for his estranged, depressive wife Claude (Charlotte Rampling) with her “heart of cement”, she features only briefly, though Rampling’s stony presence hints at a backstory thick with domestic malaise.

When it comes to planting these kinds of seeds, Ozon is an expert horticulturalist: see also the early, passing mention of a red dress, which adds a poignant resonance to the later appearance of a red top during what André describes as his “last meal” with his daughter. And other pertinent details are allowed to sprout in their own time, such as the identity of the strange, unkempt man the sisters refer to as “S---head” (Grégory Gadebois) who’s occasionally loitering in the background.

This controlled unveiling of a fuller picture is certainly engaging, but the film has the respectful air of a tribute – to Bernheim, as opposed to her father – and its sheer seemliness means it lacks the intellectual and erotic fizz of Ozon’s best work. A handful of brief flashbacks to Emmanuèle’s childhood – in which, surprise surprise, her father was every bit as much of a self-absorbed sod as in the present – tease a livelier, more daring film that never came to pass.

15 cert, 113 mins. In cinemas from Friday