Sharmill Films

When a father asks his daughter to help end his life, is it out of love or perversity? In Everything Went Fine, it is both. François Ozon’s films typically belong to the French tradition of intimiste cinema, melodramas centred on the bourgeois patriarchal family. Everything Went Fine (Tout c’est bien passé, 2021), Ozon’s twentieth feature film, is no exception. This preference for melodrama means that his films predominantly focus on familial relations and French social mores. This does not mean they ignore broader social or political issues ...

Say the words ‘Australian opera singer’ and most people, if any names were to surface at all, would nominate Nellie Melba or Joan Sutherland. But for a country with a small population, Australia, since Melba’s début in 1887 at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, has consistently punched above its weight in the production of successful classical singers. In the 1950s and 1960s, both Covent Garden and London’s alternative opera company, Sadler’s Wells, were studded with Australian singers, while in Paris, Menindee-born Lance Ingram, under the name Albert Lance, was for many years a leading tenor at the Paris Opera, partnering Maria Callas, among many others. Today singers such as Stuart Skelton and Nicole Car have major careers only slightly curtailed (one hopes) by the wretched virus.

So much critical discussion of films adapted from plays centres on the notion of the ‘opening out’ of the action and on the ways in which the director and screenwriter have disguised the work’s theatrical origins, the implication being that this is always desirable or appropriate. Mike Nichols, with his extraordinary adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), understood that some works demand a restricted, claustrophobic setting; that film can indeed feed off the physical limitations that define the stage. With this principle squarely in mind, French playwright Florian Zeller has, along with English screenwriter Christopher Hampton, adapted for the screen his own play La Père (2012). A finer example of the process of translation is hard to conceive.

‘By the grace of God, the statute of limitations has expired’, pronounces Cardinal Philippe Barbarin (François Marthouret), the Archbishop of Lyon, at a 2016 press conference. He is, of course, referring to the historical child abuse crimes committed by Father Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley). The press corps is understandably shaken. A journalist rises, indignant: ‘Excuse me, do you realise how shocking that is?’ Barbarin tries backpedalling, to no avail. The words are etched in history, signifying a rare moment of truth nestled among the lies, prevarications, and confidentiality agreements that the Catholic Church has often deployed to salvage its tainted reputation. Yet these tactics have had the opposite effect, further plunging the Church into a profound legal and moral crisis.