Perhaps best known for kinky Hitchcockian thrillers, François Ozon’s gripping dramatisation of a real-life investigation into the French Catholic Church for child sex abuse is the filmmaker in a soberer register. Gone is the sense of play or formal trickiness, replaced by an elegant but forensic, almost documentary style, and a palpable intensity to do right by his subject matter. In this sense, By The Grace Of God is a director doing fantastic work well outside his comfort zone.
Sincere, thoughtful and immaculately acted.
The story begins in 2014 when suave, confident banker Alexandre Guérin (Melvil Poupaud), a happily married Catholic family man, discovers the priest who abused him as a child, Father Preynat (Bernard Verley), is back in Lyon and still working with children under the auspices of the Church. He notifies Cardinal Philippe Barbarin (François Marthouret), and testifies to a psychologist in the Cardinal’s office, Régine Maire (Martine Erhel). She arranges a meeting between Alexandre and Preynat, who confesses to his crimes; but it becomes quickly becomes evident that the Church does not intend to take action against Preynat, just to get him to ask for forgiveness. In response, Alexandre embarks on a one-man mission to get others to come forward and get Preynat defrocked.
At this point By The Grace Of God adopts a kind of relay-race structure, where the film follows different victims who pick up the baton of activism. Alexandre engages François Debord (Denis Ménochet) an atheist who throws himself into waging an online campaign and forming a union to “lift the burden” of silence on their abuse. In turn, realising the need to find younger victims so the chances of prosecuting Preynat are not hindered by a statute of limitations, François recruits Emmanuel Thomassin (a terrific Swann Arlaud), a young violent epileptic from a dysfunctional family who goes into convulsions simply by reading Preynat’s name in the paper.
Alexandre’s story is heavy in letters read out in voiceover (the words of actual victims) which makes slightly heavy weather of the first act. But it emerges as a fast-paced compelling procedural, a kind of Spotlight played out by committed amateurs rather than investigative journalists. It’s sincere, thoughtful and immaculately acted, Ozon putting his prodigious filmmaking talents at the service of his commitment rather than something more insouciant. As timely and pressing as a 24-hour-news ticker tape, Ozon has found another colour to add to his considerable palette: angry integrity.