HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER is the harsh commandment to which André Bernheim's two daughters, Emmanuel and Pascale, are subjected.

The parents of the sculptor mother, now ill with Parkinson's disease, did not want to go to their daughter's wedding to André because "he was homosexual."

When the daughter asks her why she stayed all that time with her father despite what he did to her, she simply replies "because I loved him, what an idiot."

And André industrialist and art collector, was a brutal husband and father in selfishness, impatience, cruelty, narcissism, authority, and yet a seducer to whom "you can't say no."

Over 80 years old, with gigolo in tow, he has a stroke that renders him hemiplegic and a viveur like him, a lover of luxury and pleasure cannot bear this condition and asks his daughter Emmanuel to help him die.

Despite a mother who has produced sculptures on the ranges of gray, "because gray has so many colors in it," a woman who seems to carry all the pains of the dysfunctional family, and despite an annoying and cumbersome father who subjects them to an evil demand, the daughters continue to honor the biblical commandment that nevertheless also calls for "thou shalt not kill."

After an initial escape by Emmanuel from his father's request, the inevitable path to take turns out to be impassable and illegal.

In France, as in Italy, it is not allowed and one must turn to an association for the right to die with dignity based in Switzerland.

15 sheets of paperwork must be filled out and the parent must undergo a visit to Bern to assess his or her mental lucidity.

In addition, the expense amounts to 10,000 euros plus the cost of the ambulance.

Francois Ozon, therefore, does not hesitate to also dwell on the inevitable economic/bureaucratic data behind a choice of self-determination and end of life.

The family between love and wickedness, pain and indifference, irony and narcissism, honesty and hypocrisy, becomes Ozon's incisive, intimate and unashamed portrait that plumbs the socio-political horizon between private and public choices.

The search for a dignified death, the portrait of a family torn apart by selfishness balanced between love and evil, through atrocious memories and disregarded responsibilities and the risk of incurring 5 years' imprisonment and 75,000 euros fine for an extreme act of compassion.

Emmanuele Bernheim is a real-life character, a writer, friend, and screenwriter of Ozon's who died in 2017, to whom the director wanted to pay tribute.

In the film as a child she had wanted to kill her father, the same one who tells her that he is her favorite "son"..., that couille of a father, with a kind waiter, a desired son-in-law, a gigolo in love with patek philippe, that couille of a husband who does not want to see his "already dead" wife, with a heart of "cement."

A man in love only with himself and his vanity who uses others, again, daughters, to take leave of a life that is "finally" unbearable even for him.

Between sculptures, contemporary art and Luis Bunuel retrospectives, Ozon's flair moves with the right distance from moral choices between responsibility and love, between the good life and euthanasia through the perfect performance of Sophie Marceau, the confirmation of the unquestionable André Dussolier on the movements and face of the timeless Charlotte Rampling.

Tout s'est bien passé.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice