BFI London Film Festival 2011 - GUILTY
The lives of bailiff Alain Marécaux and his wife Odile were shattered one day in 2001 when they were arrested on suspicion of involvement in a paedophile ring, and implicated in the notorious 'Outreau Affair'. Despite their pleas of innocence, and their insistence that they didn't even know the people who had pointed the finger at them, the forces of French justice treated them in a way that altogether flouted the principle of 'innocent till proven guilty'. In Vincent Garenq's remarkable, hard-hitting film based on Alain Marécaux's own book about his ordeal, Philippe Torreton plays a man baffled to find himself losing his home, his family and his reputation, forced into prison and made to undergo harshly unsympathetic questioning in a juridical process that can fairly be described as Kafkaesque. A sometimes harrowing slice of no-holds-barred docu-drama, this tautly made film boasts an extraordinary performance from screen and stage actor Torreton - best known outside France for Bertrand Tavernier's It All Starts Today - as a man willing to stake his life on proving himself innocent.