Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/25/24 – Misericordia is a 2024 French thriller film written and directed by Alain Guiraudie. It stars Félix Kysyl and Catherine Frot. The film premiered in the Cannes Premiere section at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, where it competed for the Queer Palm. It screened at the AFI FEST in Hollywood on Wednesday, October 23.
Jérémie (Felix Kyzyl) returns to his hometown of Saint-Martial to attend his former boss’s funeral. He stays for a few days with the widow Martine (Catherine Frot). His presence angers her son Vincent. This causes a fight between the two men, which ends with Jérémie killing Vincent. He manages to conceal his crime with the unexpected help of the village priest, who provides him with an alibi in exchange for his affection.
Unlike 2013’s Stranger By The Lake, queer French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie’s latest feature Misericordia”(Miséricorde) contains no sex scenes (though there is some nudity and a flash of an erect penis which, in the context of the scene, received a big laugh at the screening). Despite that lack of explicit sex, the film throbs with an enticing sexual tension.
When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the isolated village where he grew up in rural France for the first time in years and is reunited with a childhood friend, the hypermasculine Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), as the two move closer to greet each other it feels like they might start making out or punch each other. In any case, the dynamics of their relationship and obviously rich history between them is immediately intriguing and remains so. When they eventually do begin to breathlessly wrestle one another in the middle of a forest that has a cruising ground vibe, it isn’t only homoerotic. At first it feels like that the two are going for violent sex.
Vincent’s father has just passed away and Jérémie is there to pay his respects to his widow, Vincent’s mother Martine (a wonderful Catherine Frot), who is lonely and glad of the company. Jérémie, an out-of-work baker, invites himself to stay at Martine’s home indefinitely, sleeping in Vincent’s boyhood bedroom which is still decorated with posters of football players. It soon transpires that Jérémie was infatuated with Martine’s late husband, as we see him longingly admire a photograph of the man in his speedos and asks for the negative so he can make a copy. Vincent, however, suspects that Jérémie has eyes for his mother. The plot thickens further when Jérémie becomes entangled with Vincent’s drinking buddy Walter (David Ayala) and the village’s horny gay priest (a hilarious Jacques Develay).
While Jérémie’s agenda for staying in the village remains deliciously inscrutable, in Kysyl’s hands he is an utterly compelling character. Brilliantly paced, Guiraudie expertly sustains the suspense as the narrative takes some unexpected turns with his spare screenplay emphasizing what remains unspoken between characters. There is a strong strand of dark humor running throughout and the film has an absurdist streak that I found quite amusing.
Alain Guiraudie is skilled at creating a distinct sense of place and the woodland setting of “Misericordia” is viscerally atmospheric and looks stunning too thanks to cinematographer Claire Mathon and the use of an autumnal palette. This French film is delightfully unpredictable and that is part of the fun of viewing.
