Abbé Pierre, a life of struggle: an ambitious biopic (review)

A film that fuels an anger that is ultimately very current: if the France of 2023 pisses you off, the life of L’Abbé Pierre will not calm you down.

How should we write it, exactly? Abbé Pierre or Abbé Pierre? Like a person or like a registered trademark – with the capital letter, then? It doesn’t seem like anything, but Abbé Pierre, a life of struggle is a biopic that revolves around this little stylistic precision: how does an ordinary person become a myth, a legend, a registered trademark. The favorite personality of the French, in this case, number one forever. Abbé Pierre, “the untold story” as the Americans say. This is the main angle of the film: to show us the construction of the legend of the founder of Emmaus using scenes that you have (probably) never seen on screen. So here is a Trappist brother with a deadly life, a soldier from 1940 who discovered sex in the countryside, a priest smuggler of Jews in the Alps, a popular deputy blazing with rage at the inertia of the government…

The aging of the hero (the makeup is, after The Animal Kingdomanother superb job from the CLFSX workshop in Montreuil), which is also part of the tradition, is not really the crucial issue. Abbé Pierre, a life of struggle really takes off when he gets angry. It is impossible to separate the vision of a film from the context in which we see it: in the France of 2023, see Abbé Pierre treating the deputies of France in the 1950s as lazy people in the face of poverty, or contemplating the companions of ‘Emmaüs facing the police who came to dislodge them with cries of “dirty cops” and other names of birds provokes a strange effect – a certain excitement, even, well transmitted by Lavernhe, impeccable but never as alive as when he starts rages against the institutions of post-war France. Precisely, the previous films of Frédéric Tellier, The SK1 Affair, Save or perish And Goliath were based on a certain trust in large institutions (the police, firefighters and health, justice, respectively): by wanting to tell a myth, Abbé Pierre, a life of struggle is actually a real angry film, which clashes with its calibrated biopic framework. Is anger a contemporary myth? That doesn’t depend on a capital letter, but on you and us.

Of Frédéric Tellier. With Benjamin Lavernhe, Emmanuelle Bercot, Michel Wuillermoz… Duration 2h17. Released November 8, 2023