09 July 2021 11:32
If there will be a real fire of titles over the weekend in Cannes, in the meantime the new film by François Ozon has arrived, Everything went well (Everything went fine). Certainly a nice surprise of the competition and one of the author’s best feature films, to be approached to that part of his quantitatively minor production centered on a more serious thematic-narrative register. A titles, for example, like Under the sand (2000), Franz (2016) the Thank God (2019), with whom he shares the complete and refined union between the church’s description of the dynamics and psychological interactions of the victims of pedophilia and the political-social denunciation of what happened.
This time the story is that of a woman, Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau), daughter of a gruff and often intractable, homosexual man, André Bernheim (played by the excellent André Dussolier, will perhaps remember the masterpiece of Alain Resnais Wild grasses, 2009), who at 85 was hospitalized for a stroke. Together with her other sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas), Emmanuèle will have to reconcile the strong filial love, all the heavier for her who is in some way the favorite of her father, and the abnormal fatigue of keeping up with a man with an impossible character that finds practically immobilized.
Also because soon her father, exhausted by that situation in a wheelchair, will ask her to help him get it over with. And the mother Claude (Charlotte Rampling), also with health problems and coldly locked in almost total silence, is not helpful. The weight on Emmanuèle’s shoulders is enormous, and when the possibility of hospitalization in Switzerland appears, through an association that seems serious, it will take months and everything will have to be done in great secrecy to avoid problems with the French justice.
If we reveal some aspects of the initial part of the plot it is also because the interest of the film, its considerable strength, lies in the subtlety of the direction and the script, in the great skill of the interpreters, first of all Dussolier and above all the truly splendid Sophie Marceau , which transmits its luminous presence to the film despite the gravity of the situation. Marceau, who many of us remember for teen movies like the Apple time or for his participation in major Hollywood productions such as Braveheart by Mel Gibson, he has also worked with great directors such as Maurice Pialat and Andrzej Żuławski.
The right to mourning
A great film of love between a father, children and grandchildren, according to completely unusual logics, Ozon adapts the novel with an autobiographical flavor by Emmanuèle Bernheim (the writer, former collaborator on the screenplay of other works by the director, as can also be guessed from the film, she was the partner of Serge Toubiana, former director of the monthly Cahiers du Cinéma and former director of the prestigious Cinémathèque française) making an intense psychological film with clear social denunciation on the right to give oneself one’s own death. The director seems to be saying that this right should be guaranteed by society.
Contrary to the titles of the so-called mourning trilogy (consisting of Under the sand the 2000, The time that remains of 2005 and finally from The shelter of 2009) here everything is reversed: for the person concerned, the mourning lies in continuing life at all costs, while for those who remain it lies in the long anticipation of the actual death. A film that provokes in the viewer a profound change in the perception of the canonical processes of pain related to the loss of a loved one.
The Directors’ Fortnight, on the other hand, was inaugurated with another very interesting film starring a woman writer and in which, again, everything is somehow reversed. Ouistreham is the new feature film by writer Emmanuel Carrère, a free adaptation of the novel Quai de Ouistreham by Florence Aubenas. Teodora Film will bring it to Italian cinemas.
Marianne Winckler, a well-known writer, wants to immerse herself at 360 degrees in the reality of cleaning women, those who always have their hands in the dirt we leave in large public bathrooms. For them it becomes almost a relief to go cleaning the cabins of a ferry. Here, the filth in which they are continuously immersed in a manner is directly proportional to the intensity of the human relationship that is created between the writer, capable of creating a strong empathy, and two girls who are not easy to character. Marianne, played by a Juliette Binoche at the best of her form, perhaps because she is largely at the origin of the project, but at a given moment she is discovered. An insurmountable chasm is then created between her and the two girls who are now two friends from whom she would no longer want to be separated but who instead feel heavily hurt and betrayed.
Carrère signs a film of denunciation by sliding the viewer under the skin of these invisible workers who find themselves in the lowest rung of the world of work, not infrequently precarious. At the same time, just like in Ozon’s film, it is an artistic work that subtly describes psychologies and interpersonal dynamics within a very specific social context without falling into the didactic task as a certain cinema of today. But the gap between the two worlds remains clear, despite Marianne’s efforts. And yet this is perhaps the most interesting thing: the resentment of the less well-off classes – who see decades of social conquests that seemed to have been taken away from them – towards the abandonment they have suffered and are undergoing by the wealthier classes, as well as by the whole of political power. , now seems unbridgeable unless a truly exceptional effort.
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