Full disclosure French auteur Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger By the Lake stands as one of my favorite queer films made this millennium. It’s a profound work, disquieting, thrilling, and unapologetically carnal. Guiraudie’s films are among the most original, startling and provocative, and he continues his queerly neo-Hitchcockian, darkly-comedic filmmaking approach with his latest work Misericordia.
The plot involves unemployed baker Jérémie (Félix Kysyl, paradoxical perfection) who journeys from Toulouse back to the small French village of Saint-Martial, where he grew up, to attend the funeral of an older baker friend. He is welcomed by the man’s widow Martine (the wonderful Catherine Frot) much to the ire of Martine’s hotheaded son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who Jérémie went to school with. During one of their many aggressive encounters Vincent accuses Jérémie of wanting to sleep with his mother.
Jérémie, however, has his carnal sights on another old schoolmate Walter (David Ayala), the portly village recluse. Meanwhile the local priest Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), appears to be deliberately running into Jérémie, along the road, or picking mushrooms in the forest. One fateful night Vincent and Jérémie’s fisticuffs results in a terrible tragedy. I’ll stop here so as not to ruin one of the oh-so-many twists this batshit crazy (in the best way) film has in store for audiences in the second hour. Suffice to say unrequited love is explored threefold, making for some strange bedfellows.
So much subtext to smell, taste and digest. So much pining and yearning to unpack. So many pent-up feelings, stifled inclinations.
The queer aspects of Misericordia are fascinating. We have a small town where no one can be gay, yet a protagonist who is quite brazen in pursuit of his desires—even if it almost gets him killed. We also have a shameless priest whose infatuation with Jérémie is intense and peculiar yet somehow sweet and protective.
In addition, the way Vincent likes to touch Jérémie, even in his violent manner, reveals repressed queer proclivities that are more than likely sparking his outrage and fury. It doesn’t help that he must also sense Jérémie’s attraction to his best, and seemingly only, friend Walter. In some of their fight scenes, I was reminded of the infamous nude wrestling sequence between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s highly sexual film Women in Love. Fellow gays, and cinephiles if you have not seen that masterwork, seek it out!
Writer-director Guiraudie is constantly challenging conventional ideas about love—requited and not, lust, guilt, shame—or lack thereof, and the possibility of redemption. Misericordia dares to wonder if punishment is even something that is warranted for certain crimes. It had me thinking about Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. Can a person who murders move on with his life unless he’s a sociopath? But Misericordia is far more interested in examining the spiritual notion of self-forgiveness…as well glimpsing the taboo world of horny priests.
