Jeanne Herry’s restorative-justice masterpiece humanizes our collective unconscious.
Among the nine César nominations given All Your Faces, almost half went to the actors who portray French citizens taking part in a program where victims of crimes, and the perpetrators, meet to talk through their experiences in hopes of healing mutual misunderstanding and suffering. This program is part of the restorative-justice process established in France in 2014. Director-writer Jeanne Herry adapts the practice to her interest in French society’s contemporary spiritual crisis, using performances that are, well, extraordinary.
Starting with a warmup session among social-worker facilitators Judith (Élodie Bouchez), Fanny (Suliane Brahim), and Paul (Denis Podalydès), Herry immediately drops the playacting premise to monitor the emotional register of these precarious interactions. It recalls Mike Leigh’s theatrical realism, but once communication begins, All Your Faces becomes fluidly cinematic. Herry intercuts the group sessions with a corresponding story in which Judith counsels an individual survivor, Chloé (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who agrees to confront her attacker, Benjamin (Raphaël Quenard), the half-brother recently released from his jail sentence after sexually abusing her when they were teenagers.
The parallel of intimate confrontation with the group meeting of victim/victimizer strangers raises the controversy of whether restorative justice works in reality or only in theory. A viewer knows by reacting to the empathetic, recognizable emotions — to the performers’ faces. The film’s original title — Je verrai toujours vos visages (I will always see your faces) — indicates the trauma that remains after either criminal assault or blessed forgiveness.
As social healer Judith, Bouchez has gained maturity since her teenage debut in André Téchiné’s 1995 Wild Reeds. It’s apparent in her large-eyed smile, which almost masks nervousness, a history of persevering through stress. Bouchez’s delicate nuances set the tone for others in the remarkable cast. Each face, each characterization, carries a history of familiar social trauma in which both victim and perpetrator become fascinating.
The dark-eyed Nasim (Dali Benssalah), a Muslim, suffers estrangement that goes deeper than criminality, evoking a large social history. Petite retiree Sabine (the still-radiant Miou-Miou) recounts the agoraphobia she developed after a mugging. Muslim retailer Nawelle (Leïla Bekhti) remains stifled after a robbery. Burly Grégoire (Gilles Lellouche) can’t shake the home invasion that unmanned him, and young African Issa (Birane Ba) struggles with his lifelong bad choices, as does hustler-junkie Thomas (Fred Testot).
This cross section of modern France encompasses the issues expected in social-justice films, but Herry isn’t an SJW advocate. Each character goes through emotional transition — most strikingly with Benssalah, Miou-Miou, Lellouche, and the closely viewed Exarchopoulos. Chloé’s story, accompanied by nearly subliminal youth flashbacks, benefits from implicating Judith’s own motherly concern. Because the actors vivify the psychological complexity at the heart of our public turmoil, the light touch that Herry brings to Chloé’s horror is especially moving.
American filmmakers, obsessed with social consciousness and political correctness, can’t match Herry’s attention to the psychology of social behavior and seem incapable of her sensitive embrace. These days, we find ourselves at odds with actors (Robert De Niro, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Aniston, ad nauseam) braying their political opinions in opposition to the civility and compassion expected of artists we admired for representing the human condition.
At a key moment that transcends bleeding-heart sanctimony, the group confronts Issa for his arrogance and defensiveness; Nawelle and Grégoire transcend judgment and speak out of tough caring: “Why isn’t it your fault? But own it at least. Don’t serve up lame excuses.” It’s an amazing scene of rationalization derived from the history of French rationalism — those colloquies in Racine, Molière, Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, and Jean Renoir.
Herry’s particular (feminine?) perspective exposes the unnecessary single-sex supposition of a banal group-based social drama like Twelve Angry Men, which suggested that modern society had no coed juries. (Didn’t Sidney Lumet ever see Ginger Rogers in Perfect Strangers?)
The triumph of All Your Faces confirms our common humanity during this period when social polarization is considered the norm. Herry gives us a European version of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. John Boorman made a beautiful, little-seen film of that social experiment titled In My Country. But Herry’s insight into France’s social instability reminds us of a nation’s psychic conflict — and that Boorman’s movie, signifying his interest in the collective unconscious, was based on a book titled Country of My Skull.
