François Ozon’s painful, sombre story of an ongoing child sexual abuse scandal in
France is strongest when it foregrounds the victims’ themselves
François Ozon’s new film is sombre, restrained and painful – inhibited perhaps by its sense of moral seriousness and the legal difficulty of making a movie about a case that is ongoing: a Catholic child-abuse scandal in France. Bernard Preynat is a Lyon priest who has admitted molesting 70 boys over 30 years, following an online campaign by the now middle-aged abuse survivors. Preynat has been defrocked, though a criminal trial is pending – delayed partly, it is said, by the existence of this film about him and the issue of whether it prejudices his case. Two separate court judgements have ruled in Ozon’s favour.
Quite apart from Preynat, there is the question of the cover-up; this year, his superior Cardinal Philippe Barbarin served a six-month suspended
prison sentence for failing to report the abuse. The title of this film – Grâce à Dieu, or By the Grace of God – is taken from the staggering Freudian slip Barbarin, made during his 2016 press conference about the case. Talking about the statute of limitations, he remarked casually: “La majorité des faits, grâce à Dieu, sont prescrits.” (“The majority of cases, by the grace of God, are inadmissible.”) Charitably, we might suppose he was saluting God’s grace for not putting the abuse survivors through the additional trauma of appearing in the witness box. But it just seemed like a flash of arrogance: by the grace of God, the alleged abuse happened too long ago for the Church to be investigated.