VIFF #1: Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024)
Despite a brief moment in the spotlight with Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie remains one of world cinema’s most under-appreciated masters. I’ve been eagerly anticipating his latest, Misericordia, ever since it was announced as part of the Cannes lineup earlier this year, and found myself devastated by it. It’s one of his most powerful films about our complex, ambivalent relationships to space and society. I was disturbed for an entire night after seeing it, and while I’m always wary when a new work by one of my favorite filmmakers suddenly becomes my favorite of the year, after sitting with it, it’s undoubtedly one of the best films I’ve seen this year.
After a decade away, Misericordia sees Guiraudie returning to the crime drama territory of Stranger, although this time from the opposite perspective of the murderer. A middle-aged man, Jeremie, returns to his hometown, a religious village in the French countryside. He’s there to mourn the death of the town baker, who was one of Jeremie’s early mentors, and possibly more. Jeremie stays with the baker’s widow, Martine, in her now middle-aged son’s childhood bedroom. As with many other Guiraudie films, a sort of ritual emerges, introducing the various spaces the film will cycle between. In the morning, Jeremie is woken up by the son, Vincent, who suspects Jeremie of trying to sleep with his mother and wants him to leave town. Next, he visits an old connection Walter for a drink, wanders the film’s autumnal deciduous forests looking for mushrooms, and stumbles into increasingly physical altercations with Vincent. It’s also in the forest that the town priest begins to appear, making knowing, flirtatious comments before hobbling back to church. These scenes in the forest are particularly striking. They’re astonishingly formalist, creating towering cages out of tree trunks, and depending on how thick the fog is shift between the utopic and the haunted. They recall the forests of Antichrist in their existential weight. Upon Jeremie’s returns to the baker’s home, he finds the wife, and a smattering of the film’s other characters, waiting for him either for interrogation or reminiscence.
Eventually, there’s a murder, directed with astonishing precision for maximum tonal rupture, and Jeremie is the prime suspect. As the community begins to investigate, the film becomes increasingly absurdist, never reaching the magical realist heights of The King of Escape or Staying Vertical, but enough to make Misericordia the type of film that critics tend to call “indescribable”. The basis of these absurdities is the ambiguity of these characters’ relationships, clearly based in a long history, but still malleable to the characters’ desires. Was Jeremie’s relationship with the baker professional or romantic? If the baker was Jeremie’s one true love, how does that complicate his relationship with the baker’s wife, which exists somewhere between the platonic, romantic, and maternal? Is Walter at the center of a love triangle between Vincent and Jeremie? What to make of the priest, whose advances become increasingly aggressive, and is nearly always utilized for comedic effect? Central to the tone of the film is Félix Kysyl as Jeremie. Another of Guiraudie’s surprised Pikachu-faced, bumbling queer protagonists, his perfectly pitched performance is subtly desperate, but mixed with the physical comedy of his consistently unkempt hair, and his consistently confused facial expressions.
As the world closes in on Jeremie, Misericordia becomes a dual portrait of murderer and community. For the community, the crime reveals the moral compromises each of these isolated individuals are willing to make in order to even pretend to satisfy their illicit desires, whether they be Martine’s desire for a partner and son, or those of the supposedly celibate priest, who lives alone in a cavernous church, and loves Jeremie. Jeremie, whose vulnerability to criminal punishment confines him to the community to a comical degree, becomes a man forced to conform to the community’s projections of him in any given space. Even the forest, which is initially presented as a space where primal instincts are allowed to take hold, and traditionally a dangerous but liberating erogenous zone in Guiraudie’s other films, becomes a space that’s not only consistently intruded upon, but also one where nature disconcertingly profits off of death. Guiraudie’s systematic delineation of the church, the baker’s house, the forest and Walter’s, make the distinct roles Jeremie is forced to play in each increasingly claustrophobic, while escape means certain imprisonment. Straddling a comedy and thriller, Misericordia is constantly immersed in the impossibility of its characters’ desires, tragicomically articulating the strangeness of each character’s particular strain of loss. More than any other Guiraudie film, Misericordia is about dissatisfaction, and by the end, it invokes a debilitating loneliness.
Misericordia is playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival, taking place September 26th to October 6th. To see the schedule and lineup, visit https://viff.org/festival/viff-2024/