Grâce à Dieu (2019)
Directed by François Ozon

Film Review

After a decade in which the Roman Catholic Church has been dragged kicking and screaming to accept the grim truth about widespread child sex abuse within its hallowed ranks the subject of a paedophilia has never been more topical.  2018 saw the release in France of two films that dealt with the subject in a timely and sensitive fashion - Yolande Zauberman's M and Andréa Bescond and Eric Métayer's Chatouilles.  More recently, François Ozon, a filmmaker not known for shying away from controversial subjects, confronted the matter head-on with his deft handling of a cause célèbre that has created a furore in France over the past few years and has only recently resulted in criminal convictions.

Grâce à Dieu (a.k.a. By the Grace of God) is closely based on the widely reported Preynat affair, which was still sub judice at the time Ozon was making the film.  It was in 2016 that a court case was opened against Bernard Preynat, a Catholic priest based in Lyon, after numerous allegations of child sex abuse were brought against him by his former victims.  Also implicated in the affair was Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon who broke French law by not passing on the allegations against Preynat to the authorities.  Both men would be found guilty of their crimes and convicted after the release of Ozon's film, although their defence lawyers did their damnedest to prevent it from being made.

François Ozon's best work to date has revolved around alternately brazen and intimate studies of the female psyche - Sous le sable (2000), Huit femmes (2001), Swimming Pool (2003), Angel (2007).  The director has so far tended to avoid similarly probing forays into male psychology, his only notable work in this vein being his 2005 film Le Temps qui reste in which Melvil Poupaud vividly portrays a young man forced to face up to his mortality after discovering he has a terminal illness.  It's not surprising that the actor plays a similarly conflicted individual in Ozon's latest and most daring film to date, a middle-aged family man who still has yet to come to terms with the abuse he suffered in childhood at the hands of a paedophilic priest.

Accompanying Poupaud on this harrowing process of personal release from a private hell are Denis Ménochet and Swann Arlaud.  Helped by Ozon's most intelligent and compassionate screenplay to date, these three actors bring an extraordinary sense of reality to their performances and provide us with a terrifying sense of what it is like to have been a victim of child sex abuse.  All three characters at first appear powerless to express the revulsion and anguish that they feel as a result of their childhood experiences, but by coming together and fastening on to a common goal - the exposure of a paedophilic priest - they at last find a way to begin the healing process and escape from the crushing hole in which they have become immured.

Ozon had originally intended Grâce à Dieu to be a documentary and it could be argued that this would have been a more appropriate format for the subject instead of the slightly awkward conflation of psychological drama, thriller and emotional melodrama that the director eventually opted for.  Gripping and insightful as the film is, there are a few extended passages where the power of the performances is cruelly diminished by Ozon's habit for directorial overstatement, with flourishes of self-conscious artistry that just feel inappropriate and needlessly excessive.  For once, the director tries too hard and fails to bridge the gap between mainstream accessibility and auteur rigour.

Had Ozon eschewed his increasingly mechanical form of stylisation for a more trenchantly naturalistic approach the film might have been unbearable to watch but it would have served its subject matter far more truthfully.  As it is, it still packs an incredibly powerful punch, in particular the flashback sequences which suggest (without showing) the full horror of the paedophilic crimes inflicted on unsuspecting minors.  Uneven, over-long and somewhat prone to emotional artifice in parts, Grâce à Dieu is far from being Ozon's most accomplished film, but it makes its case effectively enough.  Without being overtly anti-religious, it convinces us that at the heart of the Catholic Church there is a deadly canker that badly needs to be excised - an inability to deal honestly and openly with matters such as paedophilia that make it wide open to attack and threaten its continuing survival.

Despite the sheer daunting bleakness of its subject matter, Grâce à Dieu is a film that offers hope to a society where child abuse now appears to be endemic and trust in institutions like the Church is at an all-time low.  An intense, emotionally involving treatment of a real-life story, it was a worthy recipient of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019.  For its director, the film is a mature work that breaks new ground in its blisteringly authentic depiction of inner male fragility.  For French cinema, it boldly asserts that no subject is 'off limits', least of all one that dares to speak the truth about the ghastly crimes that the Catholic Church still cannot face up to, let alone confess.

Film Synopsis

Alexandre Guérin, a bank employee in his mid-forties, leads a harmonious life in Lyon with his wife and children, all devout Catholics.  One day, he is horrified to discover that a Catholic priest who once sexually abused him in childhood is in the area, still employed as a minister of the Church and still in a position where he can exploit vulnerable children.  Once he has overcome the shock of this discovery, Alexandre decides he must act.  He meets up with two other men who share his history of abuse at the hands of the same priest - François and Emmanuel - and together they decide to launch a campaign to promote public awareness of child abuse in the Catholic Church and have the offending priest removed from his office.  Although they are acting from the best of motives, Alexandre and his cohorts soon realise the enormity of what they have taken on.  The Church has no intention of making it easy for them to broadcast the truth that must be spoken...