(courtesy IMDb)
Saying a final goodbye to anyone you love who is dying is one of the hardest things you can do in life.
But it becomes even more devastating when it arrives out of nowhere, which is precisely what happens in Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) when a lovingly dysfunctional family, and one carer who gets more than he bargained for, set off for Switzerland where the cancer-ridden elderly matriarch of the family, the titular Marie (Hélène Vincent) , intends to end her life with a medically assisted suicide.
Only she can’t bring herself to tell her wayward middle-aged son Bruno (David Ayala) and granddaughter Anna (Juliette Gasquet) who invite themselves along for a trip to collect what Marie tells them is an unexpected inheritance.
Desperate for a way to get out of the financial morass into which he has sunk after one too many failed business ventures, Bruno doesn’t hesitate to join Marie and her accidental carer Rudy (Pierre Lottin) – he works for a company that responds to medical alerts from clients but on the day he answers Marie’s distress call, he gets way more than he bargained for, including a week-long trip to Switzerland – and his 15-year-old daughter Anna who simply wants a diversion from her school holidays.
What Bruno and Anna don’t know is that this seemingly lighthearted trip to Switzerland is based on a huge lie, one that Rudy is anxious for Marie to expose with the truth; it’s not simply the burden that is falling onto him, though that is significant, but the fact that the sustaining of the lie begins to cause all kinds of unintended side effects.
But while that is a very real concern and a key driver of the film, what really stands out in this beautifully thoughtful film is the time it takes to show a family grappling with how they relate to each other when at least two of the members are unaware of how urgent their task is.
So, what is poignant and final for Marie and viewed with extra intensity by someone who knows time is short and the clock is ticking furiously fast, is pretty much BAU for Bruno and Anna albeit heightened by the fact that they are crammed into a small van once owned by Marie’s now-dead husband where “the communications issues” cited by Marie are thrown into ever sharper relief.
To the credit of director Enya Baroux, who co-wrote the script with Martin Darondeau and Philippe Barrière, Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) doesn’t try to artificially magic up some sort of healing of the family’s festering wounds out of nowhere.
Rather, it is content to let them be normal, fallible people who don’t have a family togetherness epiphany but who stumble and takes messy steps backwards and forwards to reach the point where they are more united than they started out by the time they reach Switzerland.
It all complicated, of course, by the fact that Bruno and Anna aren’t aware that they are racing against the clock to get themselves, and while Marie and Rudy are, they differences in perspectives do mean that it takes almost all the trip for the family to reach a point where they actually feel like one.
When the truth is revealed, and it doesn’t happen as Rudy wanted, with Marie sitting every down and quietly sharing with her loved ones, but messily and accidentally, leading to all kinds of temporary schisms and issues at a point when Marie really can’t afford them.
Well, not technically anyway.
But as Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) demonstrates with empathy, sparkling humour and deftly placed friction, life rarely plays out to a schedule that suits you, and as Marie’s family sorts through issues long denied a resolution, both before and after they know the true state of her health, it becomes apparent that they will be okay.
At least enough to weather the coming storm of grief and loss, and to expand to include Rudy who, like it or not at first, ends up a part of a family which needs to reorient itself when its oldest member is no longer present.
A pitch perfect exploration of not knowing what you’ve until it’s gone, or almost, with the family getting up to speed with what really matters just in time, Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) has you laughing one moment, glorying in the closeness of in-jokes and cosy connection and then aching as four people try to find their way to each other before one of them is no longer there to be found.
Remarkably for a movie with such a mortally emphatic finish line, Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) spends much of its time celebrating the good times of life than not, sparkling with buoyant humour and a keen sense of how wondrously good it can be to be part of a family even when tensions abound and perspectives clash.
The film recognises that love can exist and even flourish even when the people who share it are at cross purposes, but even more so when sanity prevails, sober truths are shared and when all the barriers that once separated people fall way and what matters, what sits at their heart of their sometimes fractious connection, takes primacy.
Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) is a laugh, a cry, a hug and a furious argument but all of it folded into something very real and relatable, a film that makes you laugh in wry recognition, cry with shared grief and loss and enjoy watching four people discover that biological and found families can be equally as powerful and necessary when the situation asks for it.
Deftly balancing humour and heart, joy and sorrow and a sizeable amount of readily accessible humanity, Bon Voyage, Marie (On Ira) is one of those movies that ultimately lifts the spirit as it reminds viewers with real empathy and meaningful insight that though life can be an end to things, it can also be a beginning and that while the transition between the two can be ultimately hard and sorrowful, it can ultimately give you far more than it takes away.