Many people are unhappy with the American criminal justice system, which seems often to fail both at delivering justice to those that have been harmed by crime and reforming criminals so they don’t offend again and again. One alternative is restorative justice, which is already in use in parts of the United States and other countries including Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Belgium. In general, with reparative justice the focus is on repair rather than punishment, and on the damage done by to human beings by crime, rather than the technical violation of statutes.
Jeanne Herry’s All Your Faces offers a look at how restorative justice works in France. Although everyone in the film is an actor playing a scripted role, you soon forget that because it all seems so real. Herry, who also wrote the screenplay, researched the restorative process and took part in some trainings similar to those experienced by facilitators (she could not observe the actual proceedings of a restorative justice session as everything that happens in one is confidential and the presence of an author doing research could disrupt the process).
All Your Faces alternates between two main plot threads: one following of group of three victims and three perpetrators of violent robberies across five meetings, the other involving a woman who as a child was a victim of incest. In the group session, the victims and perpetrators are not paired up—the perpetrators did not harm these specific victims—which is different from the way I’ve heard the process described in the United States.
The French system is probably both safer and more appealing to the participants, who choose to be part of the process while not receiving anything in return (i.e., no good time off their sentence for the perpetrators). Plus, it’s a reasonable assumption that victims of similar crimes probably have at least some shared feelings about their experience and can share those experiences with each other while also helping the perpetrators understand how much a victim can be harmed by an action that may seem to the perpetrator like nothing at all.
Sabine (Miou-Miuo) is the 65-year-old victim of a street mugging that sent her to the hospital. Nawelle (Leila Bekhti) is a young woman of color who worked at a convenience store and was threatened and forced to the floor when her place of business was held up. Grégoire (Gilles Lellouche) was the victim, along with his daughter, of a home invasion in which both were tied up and he was not allowed to see her while the crime was in process. While each victim’s story is individual, they all speak of the fear they felt that day, the fear that lingers and prevents them from carrying out normal activities, and the blame they heap on themselves for having been victimized—they should have been more alert, they should have reacted differently, etc. etc. etc.
Such thoughts seem never to have crossed the minds of the three perpetrators—Nassim (Dali Benssalah), Issa (Birane Ba) and Thomas (Fred Testot)—who have a lot of excuses for what they do and apparently little concern for their victims. One perpetrator even asks why they dwell on the past, but over the course of the sessions comes to understand, at least somewhat, just how much they have suffered by being the victims of violent crime.
The sessions begin in a civil and formal manner, with each person introducing themselves and briefly describing the crime that is the reason they are there. The sessions use a “talking stick” (you can only talk when in possession of the stick) to prevent people from interrupting each other. There are occasional harsh exchanges between victims and perpetrators, but both also come to understand each other better.
In the second plot, Chloé (Adèle Exarchopoulos) works with a facilitator Judith (Elodie Bouchez) to sort out her feelings since her half-brother Benjamin (Raphael Quenard), who repeatedly sexually abused her as a child, and has since been released from prison. Benjamin also has a lot of excuses for himself—he was too young to know what he was doing, he never used violence so she must have been willing—and Judith is afraid that Chloé may be further damaged if she meets with him.
All Your Faces is the most interesting film I’ve seen this year, and it’s a fine example of what may be a French specialty—scripted films based on real-life situations that play like documentaries that feel realer than real. Laurent Cantet’s The Class comes immediately to mind, and I’m sure there are others I can’t recall at the moment. In any case, the point is that this type of film conveys more meaning than either a straight documentary or a conventional feature film, because the actual experience of the people portrayed has been condensed and presented by gifted actors who know how to convey emotion to the audience. | Sarah Boslaugh
All Your Faces is available on DVD from Icarus Films.
