By Jake Wilson
MISERICORDIA
★★★★
R. 103 minutes, selected cinemas
Nobody could call Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia the work of a prude. But despite a couple of fleeting surprises, there’s a lot less visible sex and nudity than in Guiraudie’s best-known film, the 2013 Stranger By the Lake, an elegant erotic thriller set in a secluded gay cruising spot.
Catherine Frot and Félix Kysyl in Misericordia.
Guiraudie’s excuse might be that Stranger By the Lake was a summer film, whereas the equally original and provocative Misericordia is an ode to autumn, when it’s logical to stay covered up.
It’s early November when the hero Jeremie (Felix Kysyl) returns after a decade to the mountainous region of Occitanie in southern France (Guiraudie’s home turf too, and the setting for most of his films).
As he gets out of the car, we can hear the breeze and feel the chill setting in. The chestnut trees in the nearby forest are turning gold, mushrooms sprout from the damp soil, mist hangs in the air.
All of this sets an appropriate mood, given that what has brought Jeremie home is death – the death not of a relative, as we might first suppose, but of his old boss at the local bakery, a crucial figure in his life.
This means reuniting with Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), the son of the deceased and a childhood friend of Jeremie’s who now views him with suspicion, especially when Jeremie decides to stick around after the funeral at the home of Vincent’s mother Martine (Catherine Frot).
A good deal of what has occurred between these characters is left to the imagination, while Jeremie is an enigma in his own right as protagonists go. He could be around 30, or somewhat older; his manner combines shyness and self-assurance, while his large, pale blue eyes seem both trustworthy and not.
One thing we might assume about him is that he’s gay, or at least that he’s attracted primarily to men. But on reflection there’s no guarantee that his claim to have a girlfriend back in Toulouse is false, or that the behaviour we witness matches who he is most of the time.
Where the closed-off world of Stranger By the Lake was depicted as a miniature society with its own rituals and conventions, here it’s harder to figure out the rules of the game. The implication is that rules tend to shift depending on circumstances, and that under the surface lust, tenderness and aggression are all part of the same continuum, making it hard to know where anyone’s desires might lead them in the long run.
As a filmmaker Guiraudie himself has little interest in following rules, at least those of any specific genre. Whether Misericordia qualifies as a thriller is in the eye of the beholder, although matters of life and death certainly enter into the plot, along with shaky alibis and secrets brought to light.
However high the stakes, the tone remains strangely equable – as in Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic The Trouble With Harry, another autumn movie, where vitality and morbidity are so interwoven it’s impossible to tell them apart.
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