French writer/director Alain Guiraudie returns with the unexpectedly hilarious Misericordia.
If Pedro Almodóvar was born in a French countryside town with little sun, he would have made Misericordia. Writer and director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) turns a whodunnit into a bedroom farce where the wanted suspect is taken to literal extremes.
After a ten-year absence, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial for the town baker’s funeral. At the urging of widow Martine (Catherine Frot), Jérémie decides to stay a little longer. His presence shakes things up in the little village and spills over into the nearby forest. Martine’s son, hot-head Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), can’t keep his hands off him. Jérémie and Vincent’s mutual friend, former farmer Walter (David Ayala), is the unwanted focal point of the two men’s conflicted dynamic. The parish priest, Philippe (Jacques Develay), is always lurking around. The longer that Jérémie stays, the more unwanted attention he attracts until even the police are involved. Why does he feel compelled to stay?
Contentious townsfolk.
Kysyl as Jérémie has a difficult job that he executes seemingly effortlessly. The character could be pathetic, archetypical, or a devious villain, but Kysyl never plays him straight. It soon becomes obvious that the town and people he left provided the most comfort to him, and it’s where he belongs most. Though Jérémie goes through the motions of leaving after the funeral, it doesn’t take much for Martine to convince him to stay. It’s also obvious why he left. His desires often get deflected or thwarted as others overpower him or throw him off course with their personal agendas. Almost everyone wants a piece of him, and passionate bursts of emotions include attraction and aggression, the driving force of this story, seem to plague him like a sudden storm of hail or a thief in the night.
Frot is inscrutable in the best way possible as Martine. In American hands, she would be playing a maternal lovable figure. Vincent accuses Jérémie of trying to seduce his mother, which is farthest from the truth, but his suspicions are not entirely unfounded, just hurled at the wrong person, As Jérémie gets embroiled in a murder mystery, Martine becomes conflicted between wanting to know the truth and leveraging the threat of law enforcement to imprison Jérémie with her as the watchful warden. There are some mysteries that remain unsolved after the credits roll such as Jérémie’s relationship with his mentor, her husband, and her son. When she asks Jérémie to take the place of her husband in the bakery, is she referring to a different oven?
Common people.
The loss of the village baker is just another nail in the coffin of a French community. Without a baker, the townsfolk must go to a nearby village to get an inferior fresh loaf. Walter functions as the town’s anthropologist cataloguing the many ways that French life is becoming more commercial, less culturally unique, and inferior in quality. The intersection of sex and death is so French. “La petite mort” is a euphemism for an orgasm, but Misericordia has zero sex, lots of death. The only time that the town turns out in full force is for Jean-Pierre’s funeral. Only one aspect of life remains local: attraction and the desire for Jérémie is like reclaiming one of their own who left for the big city (if Toulouse fits that description), a forceful repatriation.
Attraction is literal too. Jérémie is not just visiting Walter to be sociable, and the attempted realization of queer desire erupts in an unexpected act of violence. In Almodóvar’s films, the very act of being queer makes one subject to investigation. In Guiraudie’s film, being queer feels omnipresent and transgressive with the price being a beard so the women don’t feel left out. Some of the grief in Misericordia comes from the loss of opportunity: to have a crush, a long-term romantic partner, reciprocated love or not fear that the object of affection won’t suffer a sudden bout of gay panic. When Jérémie gets angry, it’s about the situation and not the person. Jérémie failed to launch and he’s trying to start over. As an adult who should be further along in life, the arrested development frustrates the ability of the characters to lash out in mature ways.
Misericordia is Latin for mercy, and the original title, Miséricordia, additionally means forgiveness or divine mercy. Guiraudie indulges in a bit of Woody Allen moral quibbling about how to live with all the evil in the world, which we contribute to deliberately or through omission. Enter Phillipe, who wants to show him more than God’s love. Phillipe counsels, “Could be, within decades there’ll be no more life on earth. It doesn’t stop people going to the movies….We’re all responsible for the carnage, and we all know it.” Guiraudie’s priest offers a similar lesson Osgood Perkins had in The Monkey: Live until you die, and love while you live even if it’s not well or reciprocated. While Almodóvar would make Phillipe into a villain or an obstacle, which is fair considering the revelations about the Catholic Church, Guiraudie makes him a figure equivalent to a bawdy twist on Les Miserables.
The bottom line.
Miséricordia is an unexpectedly hilarious film, an artsy-fartsy queer dark comedy that is thoroughly French in its irreverent meditation on death and desire. American moviegoers with delicate sensibilities should brace themselves for a narrative that’s less sexy and more twisty.
Misericordia is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of CG Cinéma. Read more reviews by Sarah G. Vincent here.
REVIEW RATING
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Misericordia - 8.5/10
8.5/10
Originally from NYC, freelance writer Sarah G. Vincent arrived in Cambridge in 1993 and was introduced to the world of repertory cinema while working at the Harvard Film Archives. Her work has appeared in Cambridge Day, newspapers, law journals, review websites and her blog, sarahgvincentviews.com.
