If director Alain Guiraudie continues to fashion stories that explore how our gaze transmits desire and manipulation, consider me seated for the rest of his filmography. You’re right–I was going to be here anyway. His scandalous Stranger by the Lake explored sensuality and sex through a thrilling, dangerous, Hitchcockian lens as a cruising hotspot had men quivering in fear and anticipation. His latest film, Misericordia, trades that beach for a remote village, but these characters communicate the same level of temptation as we witness a crime unfold right before our eyes. Who knew that getting away with murder could be so…erotically charged? Guiraudie proves, once again, that the pounding nerves of your heart and the hunger in your loins are tantalizingly connected.
Félix Kysyl’s Jérémie returns to the quiet village of Saint-Martial to pay his respects to the family of his old boss who has recently passed away. It’s obvious that Jérémie hasn’t been back for years, and the widow, Martine, welcomes Jérémie into her home. He can’t possibly drive home after having that much wine, right? Martine’s son, Vincent (an unpredictable Jean-Baptiste Durand), looks at Jérémie with a watchful, wary eye, and it doesn’t take long for that dominance to start to creep in.
Jérémie seems quiet and nice enough, but we often wonder why he has come back. That’s part of the fun as we find ourselves becoming comortable with our surroundings and easing into the dark humor of Guirande’s writing. Coming home is a cornerstone of queer filmmaking, but there something delightfully, and purposefully, off about how this fits into tha canon. Much like Jérémie himself, the film refuses to be pinned down by our expectations even as the film takes darker and most absurdist turns. We often compare films with a queer leaning, and you could see dashes of Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm with any number of coming-of-age films. Guiraudie’s latest stands on its own for how it charmingly keeps at bay but also invites us in.
There is something about how everyone latches onto Jérémie with such ease. Vincent, at first, is childish with him and tumbles about that reminds us how we can all fall into that memory-like comfort when we are reunited with someone we haven’t seen in years. Even though Martine seems surprised that Jérémie is sticking around, her grief grows accustomed to his presence quickly. When she finds him looking through a photo album of their family on vacation, he asks for the negatives of the one picture where her husband is shirtless on, interestingly enough, a beach. The village priest is always glancing in Jérémie’s direction, his gaze seemingly more knowing than everyone else’s. Even Walter, Vincent’s best buddy, watches him with fascination. Everybody wants a piece of this young man in one way or another. Kysyl gives his character a cool head even if we feel his anxiousness grow and grow in certain moments. Yes, there is a murder, but I shan’t go into the detail of it in fear of letting that spoil how Guiraudie constructs these characters knocking into one another.
When we visit the nearby woods, Guiraudie’s lens enhances the yellows of the leaves on the trees, and it feels like the wind is blowing through us, brushing our hair and making our arms float a little bit forward. Sometimes we don’t initially a character in the frame until we are also comfortable. Much like the horny men hunting for something on the beach or the confused family growing desperate for answers, Guiraudie pulls is in and forces us to take a harder look.
Misericordia is in theaters now.
