Everything Went Fine aka Tout S’est Bien Passé

Emmanuèle and father André

A film about a daughter helping her father to kill himself doesn’t sound like appointment viewing – unless you work at Dignitas (or some other physician-assisted-suicide organisation) – but in the hands of director François Ozon it is just that. There’s an “all human life is here” aspect to Everything Went Fine (Tout S’est Bien Passé originally) – it’s compassionate, dignified, funny at times, poignant and also triumphant. In a thumbnail, the film focuses on the relationship between a daughter (Sophie Marceau) and her father (André Dussollier) after he, in his mid 80s, has a stroke. He recovers a bit but he’s a shadow of his former self, paralysed down one side, mouth … Read more

An Ordinary Execution

André Dussollier and Marina Hands in An Ordinary Execution

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 July John Ball hanged, drawn and quartered, 1381 On this day in 1381, a charismatic priest called John Ball was killed publicly in front of the monarch of England, Richard II. Ball had been a “hedge” priest, roaming the countryside, unattached to a parish, a “Lollard” who believed the Church to be corrupt. In prison in Maidstone at the time of 1381’s Peasants’ Revolt – a rebellion against too much taxation, villeinage (ie slavery), corvée (obligatory unpaid labour) and the new laws making it illegal to refuse work on the grounds that the pay was too low (the Black Death had … Read more