By Brian Skutle

When writing something like this, I want to be able to highlight a performance, or movie, that is highly unlikely to actually get nominated, but has stuck with me since I first watched the film. As a daughter who is struggling with end-of-life decisions with her father, Sophie Marceau reminded me why she captivated me so much in films like “Braveheart” (1995) and “The World is Not Enough” (1999), as well as reflected the moment I was at in my own life when I watched the film earlier in 2023.

I’m fascinated by the recent film output of French filmmaker François Ozon. His early films (like “Swimming Pool” (2003)) that I’m familiar with have some dark wit and conceits behind him, but over the past few years, his work has looked at ideas of identity and the past of his characters in compelling ways. In “Everything Went Fine” (2021; released in the US in 2023), Ozon is looking at a woman who is tasked with an extraordinary responsibility; after he has a stroke, André (André Dussollier) is ready to end his life, and he would like Emmanuèle, Marceau’s character, to assist in that. Their relationship has been a tumultuous one, but that doesn’t make the moral weight of the choice any easier.

Marceau has always been a striking beauty, but her sense of humanity, and empathy, is what makes her so memorable in the roles I’ve responded to best. Here, she is a woman whose past makes her present infinitely more complicated. When we have relationships with our parents that we’ve struggled with, we can choose to work off of our past animosity, or make peace with that past, and allow ourselves, and those loved ones, grace. Every note is played beautifully in Marceau’s performance, whether it’s the scenes with Dussollier or with Géraldine Pailhas as her sister.

The change that occurs in our relationships with our parents when we go from the one they are looking after to the one looking after them is a profound one. In months before I watched “Everything Went Fine,” I watched as my wife and her family took care of her mother at the end of her life, and my own care for my mother made for some difficult decisions on my part. With those situations in mind, “Everything Went Fine” turned it into a much more profound experience. And yet, André is able to lighten the mood in a way that makes things both easier and harder for his daughters. At the heart of the film is Marceau, who navigates everything with warmth, and a sense of purpose, even if that purpose changes from the start of the story to the end of it.

Read Brian’s Review of “Everything Went Fine” here.