By the Grace of God

François Ozon’s career has zig-zagged in so many dif­fer­ent direc­tions it’s impos­si­ble to antic­i­pate what kind of movie we’re going to get each time this pro­lif­ic direc­tor returns with a new offer­ing. His pre­vi­ous film, Dou­ble Lover, was wild, sexy and ludi­crous, so it makes sense that he’d fol­low it with some­thing more sedate, but you might be sur­prised at just how dry and sober By the Grace of God is.

It’s a film which explores the sub­ject of sex­u­al abuse in the Catholic church, detail­ing the very recent expo­sure of Father Bernard Prey­nat (Bernard Ver­ley), who used his posi­tion as a scout mas­ter in the 1980s and ​’90s to prey on dozens of boys. One such vic­tim is Alexan­dre (Melvil Poupaud), a still-devout Catholic whose repeat­ed pleas for jus­tice made to Preynat’s supe­ri­or Car­di­nal Bar­barin (François Mar­thouret) are the focus of the film’s open­ing half-hour.

While Alexan­dre does con­front his abuser – an ago­nis­ing scene – the cardinal’s reluc­tance to meet with him means all of their cor­re­spon­dence takes place through let­ters and emails, with these epis­to­lary exchanges being relayed in a series of voiceovers.

Ozon is usu­al­ly such a nim­ble and imag­i­na­tive sto­ry­teller, but this open­ing sec­tion is hard work. The back-and-forth feels duti­ful and repet­i­tive, and Ozon can’t find a way to spice it up visu­al­ly, fre­quent­ly set­tling for shots of Poupaud star­ing at a com­put­er screen or look­ing con­cerned on a train as a let­ter is read on the sound­track. An abrupt change of direc­tion breathes much-need­ed life into the movie, when the nar­ra­tive baton is sud­den­ly hand­ed to François (Denis Ménochet), anoth­er Prey­nat vic­tim who wants to bring down the whole church in
a media blitz (his mis­guid­ed sug­ges­tion of a protest in the skies above the Vat­i­can is a rare moment of levity).

The forth­right spir­it François brings to the film is invig­o­rat­ing after spend­ing so much time with the more cir­cum­spect Alexan­dre, and anoth­er fresh per­spec­tive is intro­duced with Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud), whose unhap­py life and dam­aged body is an all too vis­i­ble lega­cy of Preynat’s abuse.

Each of these men has coped with their abuse to dif­fer­ent degrees, each of them has their own rela­tion­ship with God, and each of them is search­ing for some­thing unique from this process. The most potent scenes in By the Grace of God exam­ine the myr­i­ad ways that abuse can mark a person’s life and dis­tort their rela­tion­ships with their fam­i­ly and oth­ers, and while this film doesn’t play to many of Ozon’s strengths, it does dis­play his often under­val­ued gifts as a sen­si­tive and intel­li­gent drama­tist. The sec­ond hour is full of under­stat­ed but deeply mov­ing moments, and the act­ing is excep­tion­al across the board.

The tem­plate for By the Grace of God is obvi­ous­ly Tom McCarthy’s Spot­light, with Ozon even hang­ing a poster for that Oscar-win­ner in the back­ground of one scene. Ozon’s film doesn’t have the inves­tiga­tive nar­ra­tive thrust of Spot­light, how­ev­er, and it lacks any cli­mac­tic sense of vic­to­ry; Bar­barin was con­vict­ed of fail­ing to report child abuse weeks after the film’s Berlin pre­mière, while Prey­nat was defrocked this sum­mer. In any case, per­haps such a lack of con­clu­sive­ness is appro­pri­ate. This is a film about the vic­tims of abuse and, as By the Grace of God makes clear, for many vic­tims this is a sto­ry that has no end.