Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alain Guiraudie
Starring: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, Jean-Baptiste Durand, David Ayala, Sébastien Faglain
French cinema is full of melodramas in which various characters lose
their minds over some desirable nymphet. They're usually played for
laughs (Gemma Bovery), but sometimes for thrills (One Deadly Summer). With Misericordia, writer/director Alain Guiraudie mines this setup for
both black comedy and even darker thrills, delivering a devilishly queer
take on a Gallic storytelling staple.
As is usually the case with such fare, Misericordia takes place in a quiet provincial village, where the locals' idea
of a good time is to go hunting for mushrooms in the nearby woods. The
village's harmony is disrupted by the return of Jeremie (Félix Kysyl) for the funeral of his former employer, the town's baker, with whom
it's implied he may been romantically involved. After the funeral,
Jeremie is persuaded to stick around for a while by the dead man's
widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), who hopes he might take over her
late husband's bakery. Martine's son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), once a childhood friend of Jeremie's, is none too happy with this
arrangement, believing Jeremie intends to sleep with his mother. Jeremie
actually has his sights set on Walter (David Ayala), a corpulent
man-child who lives alone on a rundown nearby farm.
Refusing Vincent's Wild West sheriff-esque orders to leave town by
dawn, Jeremie ends up in a homoerotic grappling bout with Vincent in the
woods, which takes a nasty turn when Jeremie bashes his old friend's
head in with a rock. Returning to town with a flimsy alibi about
spending the night in a barn, Jeremie finds himself fending off the
attentions of the local police, and the sexual interests of village
priest Philippe (Jacques Develay).
Far from a young Adjani or Bardot, Kysyl is a rather unremarkable
looking thirtysomething man, hardly the sort you would expect to inspire
widespread lust among men and women alike. But it's in contrasting the
averageness of Jeremie with the grotesquerie of oddball inhabitants of
the village (most of the cast look like they stepped out of one of Bruno
Dumont's condescending portrayals of small town France) that sells this
idea. Now based in the city of Toulouse, where he claims to run his own
bakery, Jeremie represents sophistication to these bumpkins. And he
knows it, using the locals' inferiority complexes against them,
particularly the police, represented by a bumbling gendarme (Sébastien Faglain) trying his best not to appear shocked by Jeremie's open
homosexuality.
As you might expect from its scenario, Misericordia draws on Hitchcock, cleverly subverting the setup of I Confess by making the murderer the one wrestling with guilt and the priest
the figure who persuades him not to turn himself in. This reversal is
represented by Philippe dragging Jeremie into his confession box for the
priest to deliver a confession to the layman. Of course, Philippe uses
this to blackmail Jeremie into becoming his secret lover.
It's as dark a scenario as they come, but Guiraudie mines humour through
the growing absurdism of it all. One of the most blackly comic touches
sees the mushrooms Jeremie has been searching for in vain finally sprout
up through the soil in which he buried his victim. Amid all this human
awfulness, nature finds a way to prosper, and the feckless Vincent finally
brings something of value to the world, his rotting remains nurturing the
mushrooms that end up in his mother's omelette. It's an irony of which the
most fiendishly gifted crime writers would be proud.
Misericordia is in UK/ROI
cinemas from March 28th.
