Everything Went Fine [subtitled]

I knew almost nothing about the background of this movie—including that it was taken from a true story—until I read up on it a bit after seeing it.

Emmanuele Bernheim was a French screenwriter and novelist who also wrote a memoir about her father’s asking her to assist him in committing suicide, translated as Everything Went Well or Everything Went Fine. This movie is the film version of that book.

Her father was art collector and dealer Andre Bernheim and her mother (they were divorced at the time the film takes place) was sculptress Claude de Soria. (Claude seems like it should be a male name. I did a quick Google search. It’s usually, but not always, male.)

The movie opens with the elderly Andre having just suffered a stroke. He is visited in the hospital by Emmanuelle and his other daughter Pascale.

I thought there was a son as well, but in my reading afterward I realized I had made an incorrect inference, and that the character in question instead is a younger lover of Andre’s—Andre being gay (which I also didn’t pick up on) and his relationship with de Soria having been a lavender marriage.

This lover (that I had taken to be Andre’s son) is evidently one of those unstable loser junkies who has ruined his life with drugs, has burned through all his family and friend relationships by exploiting them any way he can for money, and is intermittently violent. Andre is said to be afraid of him, ever since a recent incident where the lover blew up and injured him. Emmanuelle and Pascale refer to him dismissively as simply “Shithead.”

The movie doesn’t pull any punches in depicting Andre’s plight after his stroke. He’s really, really messed up, in the gross ways that you generally don’t encounter unless you work in health care or are tasked with caring for a parent or elderly relative who can no longer care for himself or herself. He struggles to communicate, he struggles to control his physical movements, he can’t eat real food, he’s lost control of his bodily fluids. He just lies around in a hospital bed all day and all night absolutely miserable.

He manages to convey to Emmanuelle that he wishes to be dead, that he is counting on her to see to it that he is able to commit suicide.

As events play out, we gradually get a sense of what kind of person he is and was, and how dysfunctional his relationships with his wife and daughters are.

He has a forceful, domineering personality, at least in certain contexts, in certain relationships. He knows how to push the buttons of the people dependent on him to keep them in their place. He was manipulative and emotionally abusive when his daughters were kids, and ever since.

Even in asking Emmanuelle to assist him in killing himself, while it shows a certain trust in her, a sense that she’s worthy of such a grave and important responsibility, at the same time by not asking the sisters jointly he has kind of implicitly put Pascale down as not worthy of this responsibility, and created the potential for resentment or antagonism between his daughters in “playing favorites” in this manner.

It doesn’t feel, though, like he’s a simple villain with no redeeming qualities. He’s a highly complex, undeniably flawed person, and his relationships are highly complex and undeniably flawed. But he’s admirable, charismatic, and likable enough in certain ways that, for instance, the daughters have never written him off. It’s not like their attitude is “He turned out to be a terrible person, so we got out of that situation as soon as we could and never looked back.” They remain attached to him, by choice, and I don’t think it’s a hundred percent a matter of “Well, we have to because he’s our father.” There’s some element of that, sure, but I think he’s the kind of father that not only causes you to spend a fortune on therapy to deal with the trauma he put you through, but is also one you can love and know loves you.

At one point Emmanuelle muses that he would have made a far better friend for her than father, indicating that while obviously he’s fucked up and their relationship is fucked up, there’s still something about him that makes you glad he’s in your life and you’re connected to him—so maybe some other kind of relationship would have worked out better?

Anyway, Emmanuelle (and Pascale to the extent that she is indirectly involved) is resistant to what Andre is asking of her, for multiple reasons or on multiple levels.

Certainly she’s not keen on the idea in general of losing someone she loves like that, a feeling that’s made worse by the notion that she’s to have an active role in his death. “My father died” is bad; “I killed my father” is worse. So there’s that whole emotionally difficult issue of confronting the mortality of a parent, here augmented by what he has asked of her.

In addition, there’s a significant practical risk to her, if she agrees to what he wants. Assisted suicide is illegal in France (or was at the time of these events; I didn’t look up the current state of the law). It’s legal in some other nearby countries, including Switzerland, but the laws in France are written in such a way as to criminalize assisting someone to travel to another country to be euthanized. (Kind of like how states that are now allowed to ban abortion post-Roe, in some cases are also seeking to criminalize auxiliary acts, like providing information about abortion, paying for an abortion, driving someone over the border to a different state for an abortion, etc.)

She doesn’t know all the ins and outs of assisted suicide, what degree of risk there really is for her, how to get around the laws, etc. But of course uncertainty is no help. It’s not like “I might be putting myself at grave risk of ending up in prison” feels all that much better than “I am putting myself at grave risk of ending up in prison.”

Emmanuelle and Pascale don’t flat out refuse what Andre has asked, but they try to talk him out of it, they stall, they are evasive on the topic, etc. Which he responds to with tantrums, because he’s too helpless to do much else to get his way.

The mother—Claude—is no help at all, by the way. The daughters do bring her to the hospital once to see Andre, but nothing constructive comes of it. She’s a bitter person who seemingly has only negative feelings about Andre, and is only modestly more favorably inclined toward her daughters. She’s suffering from a debilitating depression, and probably would be even less functional than she is if she weren’t rich enough to have flunkies take care of a lot of necessary life tasks for her. She wants nothing to do with Andre, and has no interest in having any role in what is to happen with him.

Emmanuelle looks into assisted suicide and eventually does indeed decide to go along with Andre’s wishes, always keeping the door open for him to change his mind and hoping that that’s what he does.

She meets with a woman from an establishment in Switzerland that performs assisted suicides and makes an appointment.

Quite a lot of time passes, though, from when Andre first determined that he did not want to remain alive any longer. So much that regardless of the eventual outcome, in a significant sense his wishes were not honored.

Between the stalling of his daughters, and then all the time it takes to research all this and set it up, many months pass between his initial request of Emmanuelle and the time of his appointment when he is to finally be permitted to die.

Think about that. If you were in a state that was so horrible to you that even death was preferable, surely you would feel a great urgency about it. Like, imagine you’re enduring some existence that is torturous for you—e.g., you’re lying severely wounded with some excruciating injury on the battlefield, or you’ve fallen down a well and gotten trapped in a way that rescue is not possible—and you’re begging those around you, “Kill me! Please, somebody kill me!” And the response is, “Yes, yes, all in good time. But there are procedures for these things. There’s paperwork, there are appointments to make, etc. I think we should be able to help you out, though. How does next April work for you?”

That’s basically the same as saying no. Assisted suicide delayed is assisted suicide denied. Someone who has reached the point where life is unendurable for them wants to die now, not in a few months.

Anyway, she and Pascale are hauled into a police station for questioning, and ultimately, under the advice of a lawyer, for safety reasons they are unable to accompany their father to Switzerland.

One thing that’s interesting is that Andre’s condition actually improves markedly over time. Initially he’s in such a pitiable state that it’s hard not to imagine in his shoes that one might indeed prefer to be dead. But things don’t stay that bad.

In the hospital immediately after his stroke, he is perhaps 15% as functional as before the stroke. But later it’s more like 50%. And one would think that at least modest improvement from there would be possible, if he were to stick around and not die, that is.

Then, when his death appointment is very close, they all go out for a farewell dinner of sorts at his favorite fancy restaurant, and he has a wonderful time. He’s happy, he’s feeling close to his family, he’s thoroughly enjoying his interaction with his favorite waiter—he’s very much in his element.

Now it would seem—and certainly seems to his daughters—that suicide is not his best option, that he has plenty to live for, that it has now been proven that he can still be happy with the level of functioning he is capable of post-stroke. So is he ready to reconsider? Does he realize now that the whole suicide thing was a panicky decision that came at a low point, and that it no longer applies now that circumstances have changed so much?

Not at all. His resolve hasn’t weakened in the slightest. Whenever the path to suicide seems clear, he is content. Whenever there are obstacles or delays, he is upset.

To the chagrin of his family, he recognizes that the very reason he had such a positive experience at the farewell dinner, the reason it was such a bonding experience, the reason he was fully able to appreciate and savor every bite of his meal, every sip of wine, is that it was all premised on his imminent departure. Rather than the happiness of the occasion giving him a reason to change his mind, it only confirms for him that he is doing the right thing.

Incidentally, dude owns a gun. It turns out he got a gun due to his fear of that Shithead guy. So once he’s out of the hospital and not physically helpless and completely dependent on others, I don’t see that there’s anything stopping him from killing himself. I suppose assisted suicide is more “dignified” in some sense than blowing your brains out with a pistol, but it does feel like a different issue when we’re talking about assisted suicide for someone who is incapable of killing themselves (like someone lying paralyzed in a hospital bed) versus assisted suicide for someone who is able to commit regular suicide but prefers the assisted kind.

Anyway, obviously when you watch a movie like this, you can’t help but think about the question of assisted suicide in the abstract.

I was largely pro-assisted suicide going in, and felt the same way at the end.

I’ve always thought that one of the most nightmarish situations one could be in would be to want to be dead and be unable to kill oneself. I’ve long had a near phobia of that. I hate the very idea of it even more when you are being intentionally prevented from killing yourself. That’s why I would be extremely reluctant to seek mental health care if I were suicidal, or could be interpreted by others as suicidal. Because the last thing I would ever want if I truly thought suicide was my best option or even might be my best option would be for someone else to paternalistically deprive me of that option. And that’s completely acceptable, if not obligatory, by the present tenets of mental health care. Mental health professionals believe—and most of society agrees—that they are supposed to prevent suicide by any means necessary, including coercive means. Which I find appalling.

Not that I don’t understand the arguments on both sides of an issue like the assisted suicide of this movie. Plenty of people who might have some sympathy for a person like Andre would still favor the criminalization of assisted suicide on “slippery slope” grounds—the idea that if you allow it at all, it’s too difficult to limit it to only cases that are in some sense justified, because invariably you’ll end up with people killed in gray area cases that shouldn’t have been killed. That is, people who were only temporarily depressed and would have been able to adjust to their new circumstances and want to remain alive if only they hadn’t been killed before that could happen, people who were unduly influenced to choose death by greedy heirs, etc.

I agree that such unintended consequences of permitting assisted suicide deserve to be given some weight. It matters that people will die who shouldn’t.

But I think that people who oppose assisted suicide give entirely too little weight to refusing to alleviate the suffering and honor the autonomy of those who choose to die. Not permitting assisted suicide means allowing a great deal of avoidable human suffering. Frankly I think that’s considerably more important than the potential of people dying who shouldn’t. I would far rather live in a world where I can die when I choose to with some 1% or less chance that I’ll die before I choose to, than a world where I could prefer death and have it forcibly withheld from me.

My own life and death should be completely up to me. Other people should butt out, or if they’re going to be involved at all it should be to facilitate whichever choice I make when I’m not able to carry it out on my own.

Due to its subject matter, Everything Went Fine is undeniably a downer of a movie, the very opposite of a feel-good story. Yet in another sense that’s not true. Along with the depressing nature of the experience of seeing this movie, there’s simultaneously an uplifting element to seeing an important issue addressed in an intelligent, emotionally compelling manner. Everything from the writing to the acting is top notch here. I wouldn’t want every film I see to be this heavy, but I appreciate a certain percentage of them being so, at least when they’re of this level of quality.