André Dussollier and Sophie Marceau are outstanding as a father and daughter whose tricky relationship is upended when he asks for her help to die
François Ozon has brought a tremendous understated confidence and artistry to this very affecting film about euthanasia and assisted dying. There is a robust unsentimentality here, encapsulated by the throwaway gesture in the title itself, leaving us to decide what it exactly it is in the end which has gone “well”. And the final shot of a dead person, the supremely difficult moment to bring off, is haunting in its lack of emotional affect.
André Dussollier, the veteran French character
Actor, plays André, a wealthy and socially well-connected retired industrialist (late in the film, he will ask his daughter if she has remembered to bring his Legion of Honour ribbon). In his late 80s, André suffers a stroke and the vigorous, handsome but cruelly sharp-tongued man that we see in flashback is reduced to a sad state in hospital: his face and right eye sagging. He is regularly visited by his daughter Emmanuelle, or Manue, played by Sophie Marceau (and based on the author of the original autobiographical novel, Emmanuelle Bernheim). She is patently his favourite, despite her agonised memories of his cruelty towards her when she was a girl. He certainly seems much closer to Manue than to his other daughter Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) and indeed his ex-wife (played by Charlotte Rampling) who is herself consumed with her own ill-health and utterly unmoved by her ex-husband’s woes.