‘Misericordia’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Alain Guiraudie. France/Spain/Portugal 2024. 103mins. 

The films of French writer-director Alain Guiraudie can be dark (killer-at-a-cruising-ground drama Stranger By The Lake). They can be comic (his last film, terrorism-anxiety comedy Nobody’s Hero). Or they can be flat-out bizarre (quest fantasy No Rest for the Brave). But some things are absolutely consistent: a testing of the conventions of fiction, a focus on the lawless vagaries of desire, and a playfully left-field sensibility that is uniquely Guiraudie’s. Misericordia, playing in the Cannes Premiere sidebar, initially seems to promise a low-key, straight-down-the-line French rural melodrama. But then it takes a few confounding thriller detours before showing its hand as a philosophical (and even somewhat theological) disquisition on guilt, redemption and the necessity of transgression in a messed-up world.

Spiked with contradiction, absurdity and touches of jovial raunchiness

With a cast mixing French mainstream favourite Catherine Frot (Xavier Giannoli’s Marguerite) with newcomers and other unfamiliar faces, Misericordia is one of Guiraudie’s more accessible works. It stands to make a moderate mark domestically but, given its visually downbeat tone and pared-down construction, is unlikely to register abroad beyond dedicated showcases for auteur work.

Beginning with a POV shot weaving through a hilly autumn landscape (the film was shot around France’s Cévennes national park), Misericordia starts with the arrival in a small village of a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), who has been working in a bakery in Toulouse. He has come to attend the funeral of his old friend, village baker Jean-Pierre. The latter’s widow Martine (Frot) welcomes him and, while Jérémie is staying at her house, suggests he takes over her ex-husband’s bakery. While mulling it over, Jérémie finds himself staying at Martine’s longer than expected – raising the hackles of her firebrand son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand, best known as director of 2023 debut Junkyard Dogs). Vincent is convinced that Jérémie is out to sleep with Martine, whereas in fact, he was always in love with Jean-Pierre – and currently has the hots for overweight village loner Walter (David Ayala).

Eventually, Vincent and Jérémie come to blows with disastrous results. That’s when the film seems to become a macabre thriller, as Jérémie digs himself ever deeper into his own fabulations as he tries to cover his tracks; meanwhile ever-watchful village priest Father Philippe (Jacques Develay, making a terrific screen debut in late middle age) helps Jérémie off the hook for his own reasons.

The film is oddly repetitive: it builds its own increasingly claustrophobic labyrinth, from which it seems as if there is no escape. Jérémie goes from Martine’s house, to Walter’s, to the local forest – where mushroom picking season is at its height – then to Philippe’s church, and back to Martine’s, where discussions are usually in flow over drinks in the kitchen. Then the whole round tends to happen again.

Misericordia is typically spiked with contradiction, absurdity and touches of jovial raunchiness. There is also a philosophical streak that suggests that Guiraudie, as well as using a thriller framework in the way of Claude Chabrol and Georges Simenon, is also channeling those French Catholic novelists who once inspired films like Under the Sun of Satan, Diary of a Country Priest and Thérèse Desqueyroux. 

This might suggest that Misericordia is ultimately a film with a message, and a more solemn one than we’re used to with Guiraudie. But any apparent clarity should be taken with a pinch of salt, the film’s meanings shifting as constantly as the erotic drives between the various male (and occasionally female) characters.