MISERICORDIA (Alain Guiraudie 2024)

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FéLIX KYSYL, JACQUES DEVELAY IN MISERIICORDIA

ALAIN GIRAUDIE: MISERICORDIA (2024)

Guiraudie's best film since 'Stranger by the Lake'

TRAILER

This is a tale of murder, but not a traditional one. It is infused with a new variation of the spicy gay sensibility that Giraudie most effectively utilized in his most celebrated previous film.

Returning to Saint-Martial for his former boss's funeral, Jérémie's stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions.

"Misericordia" means forgiveness, and the tangled plotline and ironic picture of French village life is fraught with God's unexpectedly and cunningly forgiving ways. This is also a picture of how a traditiional rural community can fold in upon itself to protect its own, and those it wants to accept.

But can we accept this? Mores and manners may differ, as we've seen with Guiraudie (though this is still only my fourth, and he has made before, such as in his 2009 film The King of Escape. Misericordia is closer to the messiness of that than to the tight construction of the director's biggest success, the sexy, neatly shaped 2013 thriller, Stranger by the Lake, which won Best Director at Cannes. But messiness seems to be what he likes, and thrives on, and this has the panache and playful sexiness of Stranger..

We can't reveal too much of the action here. It's designed to surprise. There is murder, and there is jaw-dropping complicity. There is a gay visitor, who comes for the funeral of his former boss, and is a baker. There are several adults whom he knew when growing up here in this small town. There is a priest. And there is the still great French actress Catherine Frot, who plays a widow, who has other things on her mind.

In most memorable image is the face of Félix Kysyl, whom I'd not seen before, and who is essential to the mood, because he plays the ubiquitous visitor, who grrew up here, and returns after many years away. It is the face of an aged child, knowing and slightly dreamy. In an interview about his character, Kysyl says Jérémie is "both angel and demon," and above all "very mysterious." And the film itself is mysterious. One doesn't know where it is really finally going until the last frame.

And, as we tend to expect from the openly gay Guiraudie, sexually one hardly knows where anybody is going either. Jessica Kiang calls this film "a welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific Stranger b the Lake," and it can be seen that way - though its confined, incestuous little French village isn't anything like the gay sexual free-for-all setting of that 'Lake.'

This time an eccentric country priest, L'abbé Philippe Griseul (Jacques Develay), is a pivot point, and he and Jérémie repeatedly run into each other in the (gorgeously photographed) autumn woods hunting for muchrooms. But the Abbé is not just looking for mushrooms.

Guiraudie isn't as wild here as in several other of his films: this setting and even these noirish events may recall tradditional crime-in-the-village French thrillers, even though with both a surreal and a comical edge around nearly every scene. As Jordan Mintzer says in his Hollywood Reporter review, this is several movies running smultaneiously, which "don’t always crystallize into one." Looking for a "credible crime thriller" here may leave you unsatisfied, but if you want "repressed sexual desire" and "religious hypocrisy" in "backwoods France," voilà ! You're home. And the surprises and twists (and beautiful scenery) will bring deights in each new scene.

Misericordia (French title, Misericorde), 104 mins., debuted in the Premiere section at Cannes May 20, 2024, showing also at Munich, Telluride, Toronto, New York, Busan, London, Chicago, Mumbai, and other leading international festivals. Distributed in the US by Janus, it opened at the IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center in New York and the Landmark's Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles on Mar. 21, then heading to Boston, Chicago and more cities on Mar. 28 and to the Roxie in San Francisco on Apr. 4. Metacritic rating: 80%.