FRANCE
NPR
October 17, 2019
By Andrew Lapin
In the opening scenes of the new French drama By The Grace Of God, we see a Catholic family man named Alexandre (Melvil Poupaud) taking his wife and five kids to church. He’s happy, excited to share his faith with his family. In voiceover, though, we hear him say he’d been molested repeatedly by his priest thirty years prior. What’s more, he’s recently learned the priest has returned to the area, and is again in close contact with children.
This is something new in our growing canon of films about institutionalized sexual abuse: a survivor who isn’t being filtered through the lens of some neutral character, and who’s able to live a well-adjusted life many years after the fact, despite living in an environment filled with the trauma of that time. Later in the movie, we’ll meet other men who had been abused by the same priest, and they haven’t always fared as well. They’ve suffered deep emotional scars, and they want some kind of retribution. Finding it won’t be easy.
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