L'Abbé Pierre - Une vie de Combats is a biopic directed by Frédéric Tellier that traces the life of Henri Grouès, better known as L'Abbé Pierre. The film is due out in cinemas on November 8.
With a talented cast including Benjamin Lavernhe, Emmanuelle Bercot and Michel Vuillermoz, the film explores the life and struggles of Abbé Pierre, an emblematic figure in the defense of France's homeless and destitute. Born into a bourgeois family, Henri Grouès was a Resistance fighter, member of parliament, defender of the homeless, revolutionary and iconoclast. Throughout his life, he fought against poverty, inequality and injustice.
The film reveals every detail of Abbé Pierre's life, and this is perhaps its greatest flaw. Cette Vie de Combat lacks a point of view, a focal point, and merely scrolls through the known and unknown episodes of his life, like a Wikipedia entry, and all are treated with the same intensity, formalist heaviness that constantly plays the violins. So, yes, the protagonist's life is fascinating, and it certainly deserved to be taken up by cinema, but the nearly 2 hours 20 minutes end up knocking you out, especially when the staging is so uninventive.
The desire for completeness sometimes causes the script to skip over events that would have deserved a little more attention, and vice versa. It's a pity, because you can feel that the cast, and Benjamin Lavernhe in particular, are doing their utmost to leave a lasting impression.
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