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Sydney Morning Herald
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
It's hard to figure out the rules of the game in Misericordia
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. 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.
The Age
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
It's hard to figure out the rules of the game in Misericordia
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. 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.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Misericordia review – desire and dread in rural France
Plenty of film-makers explore the intersection between desire and violence; it's a recurring theme in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example. But in the films of Stranger By the Lake director Alain Guiraudie, the overlap between the two is so great, it almost feels as if they are one and the same thing. In this slippery French-language thriller, boyish, floppy-fringed Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns from Toulouse to the village of Saint-Martial for a funeral. His arrival unlocks a gnawing hunger among the villagers: Martine (Catherine Frot), the widow of the dead man, invites Jérémie to stay in her spare room for as long as he chooses, on the understanding that his personal space is hers to invade. Martine's bullish son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) is unsettled by Jérémie's presence, but there's a menacing intimacy to their half-serious bouts of woodland wrestling. Then there's the local priest (Jacques Develay), with his candid, prying gaze, who always seems to be picking mushrooms at the same time as Jérémie, and whose interest in the younger man goes well beyond his spiritual wellbeing. And what of Jérémie himself? Is there a motive behind his prowling visits to sad-sack local farmer Walter (David Ayala) beyond just reconnecting with an old friend over glasses of pastis? A murder raises the stakes, but even before the mystery surrounding the death of a central character, Guiraudie seeds Misericordia with needling sexual tension and latent savagery through an ominous, skin-prickling score by Marc Verdaguer and Claire Mathon's snaking, shifty camerawork. It isn't entirely satisfying – there are too many unfulfilled subplots and murky motivations – but this intriguingly tricky drama has a perverse appeal. In UK and Irish cinemas
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Misericordia review – waking dream of a movie is one of the strangest films of the year
Writer-director Alain Guiraudie must surely now be said to match Quentin Dupieux for the weirdest sense of humour in French cinema. But is comedy exactly what is happening here? Because this has to be one of the strangest films of the year – or the most deadpan of deadpan in-jokes. At one point, I thought I saw the performer playing a police officer almost laugh, but perhaps every single actor here was on the verge of cracking up throughout the shoot. It could be that every time Guiraudie yelled 'Cut' everyone burst out laughing. You could also call Misericordia queer cinema, with the word 'queer' also working in its non-sexual sense. Guiraudie made his international breakthrough with his 2013 film Stranger By the Lake, but it's now clear that the seriousness and vehemence of that psychosexual drama are atypical of the director's real instincts, which are towards waywardness and playfulness and unreadable, inscrutable mischief. And here, as sometimes in the past, he looks as if he is making it up as he goes along. A young man called Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), comes to a small village to attend the funeral of his former employer, a baker, a man for whom he appears to have had intense feelings. The dead man's widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), remembers her affection for this personable, sympathetic young man and he eagerly accepts her invitation to stay with her for as long as he likes – to the intense irritation of her son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who suspects that Jérémie's behaviour is inappropriate and that he has sexual designs on his mother. Jérémie's actual sexual designs are – bizarrely – on slovenly and unprepossessing neighbour Walter (David Ayala), who has a penchant for Rab C Nesbitt-type vests. Vincent's dislike for Jérémie escalates into an explosive confrontation, but Jérémie is protected by mysterious priest Philippe (Jacques Develay), who has his own emotional and sexual needs. Perhaps this film is just too self-consciously odd, but you feel that you are watching a dream which has been minutely transcribed and re-enacted; or perhaps all the performers are sleepwalking in the most vivid and lucid way. The film is also notable for showing semi-erect penises very candidly. Misericordia is in UK and Irish cinemas from 28 March.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A sinner, a killer and a very controversial erection: has director Alain Guiraudie surpassed Stranger By the Lake?
There's a wonderfully frank clifftop scene in Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie's new rural thriller, in which a priest seems to give absolution to a murderer. Not through some great act of clemency, though, but because of what he wants in return. 'He's a lot like me,' says the director, laughing. 'He's navigating between his greater ideals and his desires as a man. I think a lot of us do that.' Morally flexible clergymen, vacillating killers, characters whose desires lead them into terra incognita – this is Guiraudie's morally unstable terrain. Misericordia is the mirror image of his much-praised 2013 psychological drama Stranger By the Lake. Where that film made a murderer a dimly grasped object of desire, here the point of view is the killer's. Jérémie stirs up dormant passions when he returns to his childhood village for the funeral of his former baker boss. In Guiraudie's hands, it's never certain whether a story will turn out tragic or comic. In Misericordia, it's both: the film starts off in Talented Mr Ripley territory, before spiralling into bed-hopping, gendarme-dodging farce. I'd hoped to meet Guiraudie in Aveyron, where he was born and where many of his films are set, but he's upped sticks from the south-west and now lives in Paris. 'After 20 years, I fancied a change of horizon,' he says, sitting in a brasserie near the capital's Buttes-Chaumont park. 'And also I was there less and less. My furniture may as well have been in a storage unit.' With a full head of silvery hair and well-hewn features, the 60-year-old still looks fresh from a hike in the stark Aveyron highlands, in his Polartec jacket, climbing shoes and headband. Through Misericordia, Stranger By the Lake and his 2016 comedy-drama Staying Vertical, he has broadened the scope of on-screen depictions of rural France, something he thinks has narrowed since the 1970s. Mainly, Guiraudie likes to remind audiences that sexuality is just as rich out there as it is on the Parisian thoroughfare moving past our brasserie window. 'The working class has become completely excluded from the representation of sensuality, of sexuality, of homosexuality,' he says. 'There's an impression those things only concern hot young people in sexy jobs. But it's important to remember you can be a worker, or a farmer, and gay. Or not even gay, but with an erotic life.' The priest wandering into shot fully erect in Misericordia – surely a screen first – gets that point across effectively, as does the middle-aged sex worker cheerfully plying her trade in 2022's Nobody's Hero. It seems natural that Guiraudie is on intimate terms with la France profonde: he grew up in a five-house hamlet north of Toulouse with his parents on a small dairy farm. The claustrophobia of Misericordia – 'where everyone is always making up stories about the neighbours' – is a direct lift. In such a place, the idea of making films seemed absurd: 'It felt very far off socially and geographically. My parents always had a tendency to dampen my ambitions. By saying, 'Careful. It's not possible. You won't get there.'' After dropping out of history studies in Montpellier, Guiraudie began writing novels, then realised they were closer to film scripts. He broke out of his inertia by describing it, writing a story about two layabouts in a village square bantering about some magazine project. Encouraged by a Toulouse producer to film it, he turned it into his first short: 1990's Les Héros Sont Immortels (Heroes Never Die). He learned everything about film-making on the job, while working simultaneously as a night watchman. 'It was the most thrilling period of my youth,' he says, 'apart from certain great parties.' The erotic action of Stranger By the Lake was focused on the titular cruising spot, its drama alternating between horny conversations at its nudist beach and pornographically shot tussles in the undergrowth. The film had a classical purity. Although it was rapturously reviewed, and was by far his most commercially successful, some American viewers felt it described a world that had been made obsolete by Grindr and the like. But Guiraudie points out that real-life cruising is far from dead – from Berlin's Tiergarten to the actual lake where they filmed, Sainte-Croix in south-east France. 'It hasn't completely disappeared,' he says. 'Especially in France, we're still attached to it. We've still got that romantic notion of sex and love.' Even the film's explicit sex scenes added to the Greco-Roman feel. Shot with body doubles, this was an area in which Guiraudie forced himself to take a head-on approach. 'I wanted to face up to the representation of sex and of my sexuality: homosexuality. It's complicated because you give up a lot of your intimate self and you have to ask a lot of actors.' For someone whose films are so carnal, Guiraudie is an unlikely sort of moralist, in his amused fascination with how best to negotiate the world. His characters, in their wayward navigation of their desires, seem constantly to be trying to locate the correct path – not that the director, as his films veer from tragic to comic, makes it easy for them. That appears to be Guiraudie's take on how the universe works: a sense of unfathomability probably inherited from his Catholic education. Until he lost his faith at the age of 14, he insisted on going to mass himself, despite his parents' indifference to it. He points out that Catholicism has the same kind of pragmatic accommodation to sex seen in his films: 'It integrates the physical needs of man quite well. The proof is that forgives easily [via confession].' Guiraudie has torn up and strewn across the table his Kusmi tea sachet. He's getting used to Paris, he says, a once-unthinkable notion: 'I'm liking it more and more. I'm doing things the opposite way round to everyone else, heading off to the countryside as they get older.' Currently writing a new film, this Molière of the Massif Central is headed somewhere new in his work too: it will be set in France's overseas territories. Not that us humans have any choice but to adapt. 'My impression is that whatever we're living through – amorous or otherwise – never lives up to our ideals.' He laughs once more. 'Reality always smacks us in the face.' Misericordia is out on 28 March
