By the Grace of God
Grâce à Dieu
François Ozon (2019)
In recent films like The New Girlfriend and L’amant double – in Frantz too, though more subtly – François Ozon has presented sexual unorthodoxy as something intriguing, amusing, perhaps appealing. On the face of it, By the Grace of God is surprising material for him. It’s an earnest, based-on-true-events account of the Catholic Church’s prolonged cover-up of sexual abuse by one of its priests. The crimes took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s but the cover-up has continued into the 2010s. Another surprise is what a good job Ozon, who also wrote the screenplay, makes of telling his story, especially in the film’s first half. Chief among several positive factors at work are the personality and circumstances of the main character, Alexandre Guérin (Melvil Poupaud).
A banker in his early forties, Alexandre is married with five children. The family lives in Lyon, where Alexandre’s wife Marie (Aurélia Petit) teaches at the Lazaristes, a Catholic school. She and her husband are both practising Catholics, raising their four sons and one daughter in the faith. Alexandre is shocked to learn that a priest called Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley) has recently returned to work in the Lyon archdiocese: as a pre-adolescent, Alexandre was abused by Preynat in church precincts and on church scout camps. Alexandre is a quietly self-assured, emotionally controlled man but soon frank with his children about these traumatic boyhood experiences. (His wife already knows about them.) He talks with his elder sons not long after first writing to the Archbishop of Lyon, Philippe Barbarin (François Marthouret), to explain what Preynat did to him and protest against his continuing to work as a priest, and with children.
From the start, Alexandre’s campaign runs into implacable, though superficially compassionate, resistance from the church authorities. He gets to see the fatuously reassuring, casuistical Barbarin, more disturbed by Alexandre’s use of the term paedophile to describe his abuser than by what the latter has done: because ‘paedophile’ etymologically means one who loves children, Barbarin thinks the term ‘paedosexual’ more appropriately describes Preynat’s nature and behaviour. Since the abuse occurred during the term of office of a former archbishop, Barbarin distances himself from accusations of whitewashing: on the verge of becoming a cardinal, he’s dead set against any boat-rocking. A meeting between Alexandre and Preynat himself is also arranged. It’s mediated by another church employee (Martine Erhel), supposedly impartial but soon revealed to be in Barbarin’s pocket. In the interview with Alexandre, Preynat freely admits to what he’s accused of and professes to be ashamed of his sexual tendencies. He doesn’t, however, ask forgiveness for his carnal sins – to the disappointment of his superiors in the church (bizarre as that disappointment seems, given their unwillingness to take action against him). Another senior cleric tells Alexandre it’s most unlikely that Preynat will ever be defrocked. He also asks why that bothers Alexandre; after all, says the priest, Preynat is elderly and harmless now.
Although Alexandre makes clear his anger at these outrageous reactions, he’s not inclined to shouty showdowns and Ozon’s businesslike approach chimes with his protagonist’s moderation. Unobtrusive, well-groomed Alexandre turns up the pressure by going public; the church authorities don’t budge. By describing Alexandre’s increasing activity and the archdiocese’s masterly inactivity with a minimum of dramatic emphasis, Ozon develops considerable traction between them, as well as narrative momentum. There are moments that illustrate, with strong, instant impact, the growing effect of events on the Guérins’ family life. The two elder sons, Gauthier (Max Libert) and Victor (Nicolas Bauwens), are confirmed by Barbarin, their parents watching the ceremony with a mixture of pride and unease. On another occasion, Preynat turns up to take mass. Alexandre can’t bear it and leads his family out of the church. A later outing with his younger children, who are enjoying themselves, is instantly cut short when he gets a phone call that could be crucial for the campaign to expose Preynat. Ozon’s direction, throughout these sequences, is disciplined in its discretion. His lack of fuss has the effect of throwing into relief the scandal of the church authorities’ under-reaction.
The first Ozon film I saw was Time to Leave (2005), in which a young, sexually reckless and thoroughly self-centred fashion photographer called Romain discovers that he has only a few months to live. His blatant selfishness seemed to promise a distinctive twist on conventional terminal-illness drama. In the event, Romain morphed, disappointingly, into a doomed protagonist of a more familiar kind: I was left unsure how much this was down to the writer-director and how much to the actor, also new to me, who played Romain. He was Melvil Poupaud. In By the Grace of God, the first film on which he and Ozon have worked together since, his character’s particularity declines – but this time it’s certainly not the fault of Poupaud, who’s excellent. The Alexandre of the first hour, though he remains a significant figure in the story, becomes somehow submerged in it. This is partly because other characters become more prominent. It’s also partly because Ozon isn’t able to follow through what makes Alexandre remarkable – a victim of sex crimes by a Catholic priest but still a determined, even spiritually fulfilled, member of the Catholic Church.
Although the stories of other important dramatis personae are involving, By the Grace of God begins to look gradually more schematic. Along with Alexandre, the main abuse victims are François Debord (Denis Ménochet) and Emmanuel Thomassin (Swann Arlaud) – also both impelled into action by the discovery that Preynat is still alive and active in the Church. Whereas Alexandre is a professional high flyer and settled family man, drugs-dependent Emmanuel has been in and out of hospital, work and relationships throughout his adult life. François is a husband and father whose assertive atheism counterpoints Alexandre’s keeping the faith. The latter’s parents (Laurence Roy and Jacques Lagarde) told him as a child to stay quiet about what he claimed happened with Preynat: his chilly, impersonal mother, in particular, disapproves of what her son is now revealing to the world. François’s mother (Hélène Vincent), on the other hand, is remorseful that she didn’t do more to support him at the time he was abused.
These biographical elements may well reflect the situations of the men on whom Ozon has based his characters but they come to feel like a compare-and-contrast design. Support of spouses, friction with partners and relatives – these things are clearly, credibly described, and the film is consistently well acted, yet it loses power as the victims’ network expands and strengthens its profile. There’s an increasing sense that Ozon is relying on the factual basis of the material as a guarantee of dramatic substance. At any rate, his attempts to beef up the narrative are half-hearted. At one point, he suggests that Alexandre is worried his involvement with the campaign may be bad for his career but that theme isn’t pursued. Emmanuel tells Marie how he envies and admires the Guérins’ stable marriage and family life. It’s too pat when she replies that Alexandre is fighting on her behalf as well as his own: she too is a victim of childhood abuse (though by a male neighbour).
A legend on the screen introduces By the Grace of God as ‘a fictional film based on known facts’. Ozon is unsurprisingly selective in what he does and doesn’t invent. The name Preynat, thanks to the homophones ‘pray’ and ‘prey’, is, to anglophone ears, incredibly apt for a predatory priest but it’s the name of the actual priest whose sex crimes are the basis of Ozon’s story. With its hints of barbarism, Barbarin too is helpfully evocative, as well as the real name of the individual concerned. Ozon isn’t faithful, however, to the chronology of Philippe Barbarin’s elevation to cardinal, which occurred as long ago as 2003, the year following his appointment as Archbishop of Lyon. A quick online search yields nothing to suggest that the real surnames of victims are used: a French Vanity Fair article of February 2019 names the ‘first victim’ of Preynat as Alexandre Dussot-Hezez.
The film’s title is not only ironic but refers explicitly to Barbarin’s crucial slip of the tongue at a press conference where he defends his and others’ failure to deal with Preynat. He says that, ‘grâce à Dieu‘, the statute of limitation on the alleged crimes has expired. It goes without saying that subject matter of this nature will be praised as urgently topical but, in this case, the phrase is unusually meaningful. By the Grace of God premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February (where it won the Jury Grand Prix). The text Ozon puts on screen at the end must have been added since then. This explains that, in March 2019, Barbarin was convicted by a court of failing to report sex abuse and given a suspended six-month prison sentence, against which he appealed. Even that information has been overtaken by subsequent events: in June, Barbarin lost his position as head of the Archdiocese of Lyon though he still retains his title. Ozon’s closing legends also indicate that French statute of limitations law in cases of this kind has now been changed but that Bernard Preynat remains a priest. That too is now out of date: according to Wikipedia, Preynat, who tried and failed to block the film’s release in France, was defrocked in July this year.
The timeframe of the action is 2014 to 2016. There’s a Christmas scene for each of the three years, the last of which is also the film’s finale. The leading campaign members gather at the Guérins’ home to celebrate the progress of their work and their award as Lyon’s citizens of the year (they’re grimly amused that the previous year’s winner was Barbarin), and to discuss what happens next. Gilles Perret (Éric Caravaca) and his wife (Jeanne Rosa), who’ve played important roles in the group’s work, take the opportunity to announce they won’t continue because they feel the network is taking over their lives. François calls vigorously for public apostasy all round. Alexandre disagrees: he says it’s important to fight for justice from within the Church. When the guests have gone and his eldest son returns home after a night out with friends, Gauthier asks how the evening went. Alexandre admits there were some tense moments. His son then asks, ‘Dad, do you still believe in God?’
Ozon’s expressive discretion extends to brief flashbacks to the scout camps, as remembered by the victims. These show each of the boys entering or approaching a tent with the younger Preynat (Yves-Marie Bastien, whose creepy appearance may be a mistake: there are repeated references to Preynat’s personal charm, which Bernard Verley is able to hint at) but go no further. As several critics have suggested, By the Grace of God paints a distinctive portrait of male vulnerability at different ages. It’s a worthy and, in several important ways, a skilful piece of work – more remarkable because it’s unexpected for a film-maker of Ozon’s temperament. The ending, though, confirms a failure of imaginative sympathy on his part that limits the piece. He keeps his camera on Melvil Poupaud’s gently unsmiling, then uncertain face for several seconds after Gauthier has asked about his father’s belief in God. The clear implication is that Alexandre can no longer say yes.
The weight given to this final moment is a cheat because Alexandre is being asked the wrong question. He made clear at the very start that what happened to him as a boy and its aftermath had made it a struggle for him to remain a good Catholic but that he’d managed to do so. The final question for him is, rather, ‘Can you really remain a member of a church still trying to evade the sexual abuse issue and to protect its own interests?’ Alexandre’s final silence may tell the viewer more about the personal views of the man who made the film than about the one whose face is on the screen. Eliding the difference between faith in God and in the church as an institution, as Ozon does here, allows him to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It also confirms his losing touch with what makes Alexandre an exceptionally interesting character.
19 October 2019