By the Grace of God

This film would have been better as a documentary, as concrete people do not mix very well with fictionalised characters. That the characters are mainly composites, leaves a lot of choice for the director, Francois Ozon, to omit certain areas. Two examples; the wife of one of the characters suffered sexual abuse but not within the church. She has only a very short time to admit this to another victim played excellently by Swann Arlaud. In the scenario of this film, only heterosexual males are singled out, and this becomes evident in a key scene, again given too little screen time. That of a character called Didier played superbly by Pierre Lottin (the screen suddenly came vividly to life). He is a youngish man wrecked by the church and its hierarchy, and the sexual offence committed against him by a priest as a child. He has lost outwardly and inwardly, even condemning his own homosexual brother who committed suicide because of a similar assault. He is homophobic and real whereas the others, and there are three who are concentrated on, do not venture into that taboo and unfortunately believable area. Melvil Poupard is initially the main character, well adjusted but disturbed. The focus then shifts towards a second and ultimately to a third, excellently portrayed by Swann Arlaud. Like Didier he has lost out because of church sexual abuse, but he does find a sort of release in joining in with the others when a decision is made to prosecute the church. Personally I found him as well as Didier to be burning indictments of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy. France holds its church highly in its societal and cultural life, but I wished that Ozon in his rather cold direction had stoked the fire against the church more, and allowed other voices than the heterosexual male to do so. A good film that in my opinion could have been longer and risked audience impatience (Jacques Rivette did it before him in other subject matter to great respect). In doing so he could have taken the risk to include in his fictional area the sufferings of other sexualities when they are abused, especially by an institution that cements so much of France together.