Get a load of this from the writer and director of “Who By Fire,” Philippe Lesage: “I’ve never been easy on adults, or the masculine, or the order of the Pater, which seeks to stifle, to destroy.” He then soldiers on about how Pater “struggles desperately to maintain its hold on social codes and … with the utmost futility erects as truths the tenacious stereotypes of the feminine and masculine.”

Mr. Lesage’s pontifications bear quoting at length if only to serve as the umpteenth example of an old saw: “Trust the art, not the artist.” You’d never guess from his atrocious blather that “Who By Fire” is a film of rare merit, of finely wrought contradictions and tensely stated ironies. Although the director stumbles a bit toward the picture’s conclusion, Mr. Lesage has created something fulsome: a two-and-a-half-hour sojourn that doesn’t wear out its welcome.