Baffling and Beautiful, Misericordia Is the Strangest of French Thrillers
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller. The French director, whose best-known film Stateside remains 2014’s sunny, rambling queer mystery Stranger by the Lake, specializes in these kinds of slippery genre hybrids, movies that start off as one thing and eventually become other things, all without ever betraying their essence. Misericordia was a major critical hit in France, where it was nominated for mountains of awards and was named the best film of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma. The director’s shape-shifting narratives, forever flirting with the metaphysical, are obviously a known quantity there. It’ll be interesting to see how Misericordia plays in the U.S., where viewers don’t always enjoy having their expectations confounded.
The film begins in a somber and ominous register, as Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) returns to the small village of St. Martial where he spent his youth to attend the funeral of the baker for whom he worked and with whose family he lived. Immediately, there is tension with the baker’s son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand). He and Jérémie were once the best of friends, and perhaps even more than that; now their lives have gone in different directions, and a corrosive, inexpressible conflict seems to be brewing between them. Jérémie also grows close with Martine (Catherine Frot), Vincent’s mom, as they bond over their shared memories of the baker. We sense, again, that perhaps there was more to Jérémie’s relationship with his former boss as well. As if that weren’t enough, Jérémie seems to be quite taken with Walter (David Ayala), a portly, reclusive sad sack of a man living on the outskirts of town.
A Sirkian network of desires lurks just under the surface of the drama: Everybody seems to want somebody else. And all that sublimated desire propels the picture’s thrillerlike elements: Jérémie’s conflict with Vincent gets more dangerous, while his fascination with Walter grows. As a pure narrative, this would be mostly ridiculous, but that’s where Guiraudie’s skill as a filmmaker comes in. He and cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Spencer) give this landscape, with its rough roads and forest canopies and dramatic cliffs, both lyrical beauty and eerie portent: Immersed in nature and removed from society, everybody’s been reduced to their base desires. As a protagonist, Jérémie also bears some similarities to Terence Stamp’s mysterious ambisexual stranger in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classico-capitalist allegory Teorema (1968) — and just as Pasolini did, Guiraudie grasps that the more ornamentation you strip away from a tale, the purer its perversity becomes. Reason, it turns out, is the greatest luxury.
Misericordia has elements of rural noir, but it gathers both absurdity and lethality as it progresses. Guiraudie isn’t much for emotion in his actors: An unreadable person, after all, is also an unpredictable person. We start off viewing Jérémie as a victim of others’ assumptions and needs, but as he overstays his welcome in this place, his weird, stony persistence allows us to see how this man could drive everyone around him crazy. And yet, the movie doesn’t provide easy answers to any questions of motivation or morality or justice. Maybe because Guiraudie has other things on his mind. As our protagonist’s increasing desperation reaches comic proportions, we begin to realize that all along we’ve been watching a film about how to continue living in a world where our actions constantly cause misery, uncertainty, and pain.