When Antoine, a general practitioner, learns that he has Charcot disease, an incurable neurodegenerative disease that gradually paralyzes the body’s muscles, he wants to tell his story, because he wants to control the end of his life. Patients die on average within three to five years after diagnosis of this disease.
Antoine contacted the production company of Marina Carrère d’Encausse and met her. They fall in love. “Of course, if at some point he asked me, because he doesn’t have the means himself to stop, of course I would, even if it’s illegal, of course I would.” says the doctor who hosts “Health Magazine” on France 5.
Good humor, even joy of living, there is it throughout the film. In France, the government is preparing to propose a new law on the end of life, after the Claeys-Leonetti law (2016) which opened new rights to patients: possibility of giving binding advance directives for the doctor and requesting a deep and continuous sedation until death, occurring naturally. For this, the patient must suffer unbearably and his death must be recognized as inevitable and imminent.
Parole inestimable
No doctor has the right in France to reduce the suffering of a patient, even at their request. The future bill must open up “access to active assistance in dying”. “Which model to choose? », asks Marina Carrère d’Encausse, who takes us to Belgium, where euthanasia has been legal for twenty years, then to Switzerland, where we can resort to assisted suicide, and finally to Quebec, where there is medical aid to die, to understand the choices available to us.
What follows is a moving and delicate journey where we meet patients who have decided to put an end to it and the doctors who accompany them. “Do you realize how lucky I am? I die in full consciousness,” explains Françoise, condemned by cancer. “To cause death is a power that I do not want to have over patients,” objects Claire Fourcade, hospital doctor and president of the French Society for Support and Palliative Care.
With supporting figures, over the course of various situations and legislation, Magali Cotard and Marina Carrère d’Encausse pose a fascinating reflection, all the more honest as the latter has exposed her convictions in medias res and the two women make a great room for the invaluable words of the people who use these provisions as well as the doctors who face it. While weighing the power relationships that link the two.
What is successful palliative care support? What gives meaning to sick people’s days? Can killing be an act of care? What does it mean to die with dignity? What funeral rituals? So many questions that raise political issues: an undersized palliative care network, the failure to welcome and take care of certain suffering, the obligation for French patients to go abroad to be able to implement their end-of-life project, the violence that it represents for caregivers to kill and for families to support and then manage the bereavement. An important documentary whose lively engagement can only provoke reflection.