‘All Your Faces’: When victims and criminals come face to face

With her acting career increasingly on the back burner, French director Jeanne Herry delves into the social work that has been carried out in France since 2014 by so-called restorative justice professionals. Restorative justice is a mediation and support system that provides victims and criminals with the possibility of seeking together a path to reparation and forgiveness.

In All Your Faces, Herry does not conceal her faith in the results of a fragile procedure. To do this, the director constructed her film in a simple and effective way through two therapies, one individual and one for a group; these sessions run parallel and serve to explain what this kind of social reintegration is all about. It is an ensemble film in which the actress Adèle Exarchopoulos stands out as a young woman who faces her past, a childhood and adolescence marked by the sexual abuse of her older brother. Also of note is the actor Dali Benssalah as a longtime thief imprisoned after his last heist. Well-known faces of French cinema make an appearance, including Élodie Bouchez, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gilles Lellouche and the director’s mother, the veteran Miou-Miou, completing a cast that brings to life therapists, victims and criminals willing to delve into their own worst nightmares.

The cases on the table are violent robberies except for the one starring Exarchopoulos, an actress who once again fills everything she touches with soul. Her character modestly shows the open wound and emotional labyrinths of a victim when her attacker is released and she requires help to avoid his shadow. The chilling final encounter between the two is courageous and gives the film meaning.

All Your Faces has plenty of flashbacks and an overly formatted style when it comes to exposing traumas and processes as painful as those addressed. Still, the film offers some undoubtedly sociological value; the certainty that we live in societies that cultivate hatred so blatantly that they make the work of restorative justice necessary and even subversive.