Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural hometown of Saint-Martial, from which he has been away for some ten years, for the funeral of his former boss. Upon arrival, he briefly reconnects with the man’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), and his son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a childhood friend. For the moment, though, the funeral proceedings take over. When Jérémie decides to stay with Martine for the night, and then for a few days following, however, his presence begins to upset the delicate balance of the town’s relations. By the film’s end, more than one body will be newly interned in the commune of Saint-Martial.
At least initially, Misericordia follows the outlines of a conventional backwoods thriller, following as the arrival of an outsider leads to a fateful crime and a subsequent investigation. As Jérémie stays on at Martine’s, Vincent grows increasingly agitated by his continued presence, which leads to a series of increasingly violent confrontations that culminates with Jérémie killing Vincent in the woods and disposing of the body. The investigation around Vincent’s disappearance then drives the remainder of the film. What distinguishes Guiraduie’s approach, though, is how this archetypal plot is enmeshed in a web of conflicting desires whose patterns remain ever obscure, unstable, and which gradually transform our response to the death. It soon becomes evident, for instance, that Jérémie had a more than professional devotion to Martine’s husband, that Martine, in turn, may have more than a maternal attachment to Jérémie, and that these relations feed into Vincent’s own long history with Jérémie. Thus, when Jérémie and Vincent first butt heads, wrestling in the woods, the confrontation is an ambiguous mix of genuine aggression, playful fooling around, and sexual tension. Even when the violence escalates, the ambiguity remains, such that the actual murder — which Guiraudie cuts and frames so as to suppress our sense of deliberation on Jérémie’s part — is both surprising and genuinely upsetting. This being a Guiraudie film, the characters’ desires rarely follow conventional societal expectations. What is significant, however — and also what makes the director’s films genuinely transgressive — is not simply that the film’s myriad expressions of desire violate conventional regularities (though they do), but that they point to the very instability of the imaginative framework on which those regularities are founded.
In this respect, the most useful point of reference for Guiraudie’s achievement is, however unlikely, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955). In that film, the dead body of a stranger is found on the outskirts of an idyllic Vermont town, whose inhabitants are uniquely unbothered by the occurrence, seeing it as little more than an inconvenience. Much of the film thus observes how the (assumed) murder is gradually assimilated by a core group, whose relationships reconfigure around the newly deceased. In Misericordia, likewise, we observe as a set of villagers — principally Martine, Walter (David Ayala), a portly loner, and Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), a nosy country priest — confront the facts of Jérémie’s arrival and Vincent’s disappearance. Although Vincent’s death is genuinely upsetting, and granted a dramatic force entirely absent from Harry, what is remarkable is how the group gradually arrives at a similar place as the one in the earlier film. All this is to say that Misericordia demonstrates the Hitchcockian lesson that every story is founded on a kind of imaginative projection — that is, an understanding of how the real and the imaginary are connected — and that precisely for this reason, the regularities we take for granted at any moment are unstable, and may give way at any moment, as they so clearly do in films like Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). Put differently, both films show us how one’s response to a dead body, say, can always be transformed by the relations that surround it — in the case of Misericordia, by the unstable, unpredictable undercurrents of the characters’ desires.
It should be said though, that in Misericordia, Guiraudie has set himself a higher degree of difficulty than Hitchcock has in The Trouble with Harry. For one thing, the dead body in the latter is that of an outsider, while in the former, it is someone from the town itself. For another, and more importantly: whereas Hitchcock establishes his film’s distinctively blithe register from the outset, and simply maintains it throughout, Guiraudie continually modulates the film’s tone, largely by transforming the characters’ (and our) relation to the murder. The fact that every character in The Trouble with Harry simply treats the dead body not as a source of distress but as a mere inconvenience is established by artistic fiat: we expect a world where murder is taken seriously, and the imaginative challenge of the film is that in this world it is not. In Misericordia, by contrast, Guiraudie sets himself the more difficult task of rendering the successive imaginative (and tonal) upheavals required to get to that point. And what’s more, he succeeds, finally managing to harmonize the tragic heft of a Cain-and-Abel murder with one of the funniest dick reveals in cinema history. If Misericordia thus stands not just as a novel development of Hitchcock but also as a major film in Guiraudie’s oeuvre, it is because it fuses the more naturalistic register of Stranger by the Lake (2013) with the farcical, fabulist tendencies of such films as No Rest of the Brave (2003) and The King of Escape (2009). It is the finest showcase to date of Guiraudie’s uncanny ability to not just establish a coherent film-world, but continually transform the relations between the real and the imaginary that make it possible.
Published as part if TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
