The modest €700,000 film, which is set to break box-office records for a documentary, is based on the veneration of the Sacred Heart, founded in the 1670s by Saint Marguerite-Marie of Paray-le-Monial, and features actors playing Jesus Christ and the canonised nun. It mixes fictional re-enactment of historical episodes with interviews with modern devotees who testify to the comfort they have derived from the faith.
Partly financed by Vincent Bolloré, the Catholic billionaire, and heavily promoted by his media empire, which includes Canal+ television and Europe1 radio, the film stirred immediate hostility from left-wing defenders of laïcité, France’s strictly enforced state secularism.
Critics, including some progressive Catholics, call it a vehicle for hard-right identity politics. They see it harking back to the Sacred Heart as the emblem of royalists who resisted the 1789 revolution and opponents of the 1871 Paris commune, whose victory was commemorated by the creation of the Sacré Coeur basilica of Montmartre.
The film’s supporters alleged censorship when its posters were banned last month by the Paris public transport system, the RATP, and by SNCF, the state rail operator, because they were deemed “confessional and proselytising and … incompatible with the principle of public service neutrality”.
Benoît Payan, the centre-left mayor of Marseille, halted projection an hour before the film was due to open at the Château de La Buzine, the city’s prime culture complex, because “a public facility cannot host screenings of a religious nature”.
With the help of Stéphane Ravier, a senator and former member of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Éric Zemmour’s far-right Reconquête party, the film-makers won a court injunction forcing Payan to allow the screening.
“The mayor of Marseille committed a serious and manifestly unlawful infringement of freedom of expression, freedom of creation, and freedom of artistic distribution,” the judge ruled.
Hubert de Torcy, head of SAJE, the film’s distributors, said the ban was incomprehensible because “the film’s subject is part of French history and French culture”.
Steven Gunnell, 50, who embraced the faith two decades ago after depression and alcoholism led him to “find God at the back of a church”, said the ban on the documentary’s advertising was absurd because films critical of Christianity were publicised freely in public spaces.
The director, whose father was a British rock musician who settled in France, attributed the film’s success to divine providence and angrily rejected claims that its promotion on Bolloré’s media, including the popular CNews television channel, meant that it was reactionary propaganda.
“We just want to talk to everyone. But because I’m invited on CNews, people call me Goebbels’s friend. Why not call us Nazis while you’re at it?” he told Le Monde newspaper. “It drives me crazy. I’ve spent my life preaching mercy.
“It’s pretty impressive to have this movie out there in the middle of all the chaos — wars, social tensions. Some people criticise it, saying it’s flat, kitschy, badly written. But Jesus himself didn’t please everyone.”
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Critics gave the film a lukewarm reception but the public rated it highly, with an average of 4.3 out of 5 on Allociné, France’s main film aggregation site. The site recommended caution, however, noting an unusual distribution of ratings, which suggested activity by “malicious users who artificially inflate or deflate a film’s score”.
Traditionalist cheered the film’s success as evidence of a French spiritual awakening, which has also been seen in other phenomena such as popular new feast-day pilgrimages by young Catholics. Tribune Chrétienne, a conservative publication, said the film “upsets the sad types who prefer celebrating death with Halloween, hatred on social media and the pride of their fleeting idols”.
Criticism from the religious left was voiced in La Croix, the Catholic daily newspaper. An open letter from progressive church members took issue with the enthusiastic reception for the film, saying it showed “the growing normalisation of far-right ideas within the Christian community”.
“The Sacred Heart of Jesus is being put at the service of a political agenda whose obsession is the reaffirmation of France’s Christian identity. Pope Francis was right to be concerned [about this],” it said.
