This hagiography without any real point of view would make a good campaign spot calling for donations for the benefit of Emmaus, if the film were not so long.
Celestial landscape, blue light, starry sky, the recognizable silhouette of Abbé Pierre, beret and curved back, advances with small steps in this dreamlike setting. “Have I made the world a little better?” asks the abbot, who can easily be imagined on the verge of death. The tone is set. “”Abbé Pierre: a life of combat” then returns for more than two hours to the epic of this man with an exceptional destiny, from his short stay with the Capuchins, until his last breath, passing by his role in the Resistance, the creation of the Emmaus companions and his constant commitment to defending the most deprived. This biopic is released in theaters on November 8.
“I don’t want to live like a privileged person, I would like to be a saint.”, confides the man called Henry Grouès, born in Lyon in 1912 into a bourgeois family, before becoming Abbé Pierre. The confidence is released in the fields, between two young men leaning against a bale of hay. It is 1939, Henry has just been politely dismissed by the Capuchins, an austere order to which his fragile health cannot accommodate. The film returns to his involvement in the Resistance, in the Vercors maquis, and his role in saving Jewish children. It was at this time that he met Lucie Coutaz, who would become his secretary and lifelong accomplice.
A great leading role for Benjamin Lavernhe
From his short career in politics (he was a deputy), through the creation of Emmaus, the appeal of 1954 and the internationalization of the Emmaus movement, through the starization of the abbot, the film relates the different stages of the life of this man with fragile health but an iron will. A tenacity that does not prevent doubts.
This complex personality, marked by a mystical aspiration but also ambiguous in his relationship to power and the media, is embodied by the resident of the Comédie-Française Benjamin Lavernhe, whom we are more accustomed to seeing in comedies in the cinema (The meaning of the celebration, Joséphine in the Cévennes, The Discourse…).
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Despite the performance of the latter, as well as those of Emmanuelle Bercot or Michel Vuillermoz, invested in their roles, the film struggles to convince us. Enter the intimacy of an icon, film the holiness, the misery, the struggles, reveal another side of the abbot? We don’t quite understand the ambition of this film interlaced with archives. Stuffed with visual effects from another age (free), weighed down by omnipresent music which underlines the excesses of pathos, the staging is sorely lacking in sobriety and surprises.
We have to wait until the very end of this hagiography, when Abbé Pierre is bowing out, to see a truth appear on the screen without effects and without music. Thus the last moments shared with Lucie, the lifelong friend, with whom the abbot forms a strange couple, or the announcement of the transmission to his successor, full of tenderness and humor, in the refectory of a center Emmaus. Very simple scenes, which sketch, too late, a truly human dimension to this character who has become an Epinal image.
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The sheet
Gender : Biopic, Drama
Director: Frédéric Tellier
Actors: Benjamin Lavernhe, Emmanuelle Bercot, Michel Vuillermoz
Country : France
Duration : 2h 18min
Exit : 2023
Distributer : SND
Synopsis : Born into a wealthy family, Henri Grouès was at the same time resistant, deputy, defender of the homeless, revolutionary and iconoclast. From the benches of the National Assembly to the slums of the Parisian suburbs, his commitment to the weakest has earned him international fame. The creation of Emmaüs and the tidal wave of his unforgettable appeal in the winter of 54 made him an icon. Yet every day he doubted his actions. His frailties, his suffering, his barely credible intimate life remained unknown to the general public. Revolted by poverty and injustice, often criticized, sometimes betrayed, Henri Grouès had a thousand lives and fought a thousand battles. He left his mark on History under the name he chose for himself: Abbé Pierre.