The Contending’s Frank J. Avella sits down with Misericordia writer/director Alain Guiraudie to chat about his latest film.
Writer-director Alain Guiraudie constantly challenges conventional ideas about love—requited and not, lust, guilt, shame—or lack thereof, and the possibility of redemption.
Starting with his first feature, Sunshine for the Poor in 2001, celebrated Out filmmaker Alain Guiraudie has crafted 10 complex queer-themed or queer-adjacent films from No Rest for the Brave (2003) to The King of Escape (2009) to his most celebrated and controversial work, Stranger by the Lake (2013) to Staying Vertical (2016) to his latest mix of dark comedy, desire and death, Misericordia.
Prior to 2001, Guiraudie spent a little over a decade making short films, and throughout his cinematic career, he also wrote many novels.
In 2013, he won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Stranger by the Lake, a film that is one of my favorite queer films made this millennium. It’s a profound work, disquieting, thrilling, unapologetically carnal. It’s also a wickedly honest look at both apathy and fear.
Misericordia returns to his provocative probing of human behavior, both sexual, violent and spiritual, this time in a quasi, neo-Hitchcockian, Fassbinder-esque manner funneled through a gritty, lustful, if repressed rural milieu.
The plot centers on unemployed baker Jérémie (a fascinating Félix Kysyl) who travels from Toulouse back to the small French village of Saint-Martial, where he grew up, to attend the funeral of an older baker friend (mentor? former lover?). He is welcomed by the man’s widow Martine (the fabulous Catherine Frot) much to the ire of Martine’s hotheaded son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), with whom Jérémie went to school. They seem to have some sort of shared past—although we’re never told much about it. During one of their many aggressive encounters Vincent accuses Jérémie of wanting to sleep with his mother. Outrageous! But is it?
Jérémie does seem to have his carnal sights on another old schoolmate Walter (David Ayala), the portly village recluse, who doesn’t even recall Jérémie ever liking him. Alas, the heart wants what it wants—or in this case, the penis does.
Meanwhile the dowdy local priest Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), appears to be deliberately running into Jérémie, everywhere in the village and one fateful night Vincent and Jérémie’s fisticuffs results in a terrible tragedy. What happens next, like in many Guiraudie films, defies prediction and expectation, but always feels authentic to the characters he creates. They pine and yearn and stifle and hide and, sometimes, allow themselves to explode. And in one wacky, unforgettable moment, a priest shows us just how excited he can get.
Misericordia premiered at Cannes last year and was part of the 2024 New York Film Festival. The film just opened in theatres in the U.S.
The Contending had the pleasure of a zoom-chat with the audacious auteur. Check out our review here.
