Misericordia: A Quirky Mix of Sex Farce and Darkness
By Liz Braun
Rating: B
In Misericordia, a young man returns to the town where he grew up and quickly becomes a lightning rod for everybody’s unexpressed desires.
Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) drives into the rural French village of his youth and stops at the boulangerie, the very place he learned his trade as a baker. He has come to pay his respects to the late Jean-Pierre, the patissier who mentored him. Jérémie is warmly greeted by Jean-Pierre’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Less enthused to see him is Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), Jean-Pierre’s adult son. It becomes clear that Jeremie and Vincent were childhood friends, but something seems to have gone wrong between them.
A grieving widow (Catherine Frot) is just one of the locals fixated on Jeremie (Felix Kysyl)
Next into the mix is Walter (David Ayala) a schlubby local who has also known Jeremie since childhood — but they were never really buddies. Walter and Vincent, however, are still close friends, another nod to Jérémie’s outsider status. And then there is the village priest (Jacques Develay), a sage older cleric who knows plenty about human motivation.
Jérémie is quiet and self-contained. He mentions in passing that he has recently broken up with his girlfriend and has taken a break from work, so there’s no need for him to rush back to his home in Toulouse.
When Martine insists he sleep over after the funeral, he agrees. She puts him in Vincent’s childhood bedroom. Thereafter all hell breaks loose, in a philosophical, blackly comic, murderous kind of way.
The thuggish Vincent is convinced that Jérémie wants to sleep with his widowed mother, the beautiful Martine, and is suitably furious about it; he constantly grabs Jérémie to wrestle him or push him around, and in a fashion that suggests he has his own repressed feelings about Jérémie.
Martine’s maternal air toward Jérémie does indeed have a soupçon of something sexual to it; as for the unkempt Walter, is Jérémie attracted to him? And why does the priest keep showing up wherever Jérémie walks in the nearby forest?
Wandering through this homoerotic landscape, Jeremie is initially an opaque character, seemingly someone upon whom the others project their desires. There are hints about who Jérémie is — that boyish haircut is super-sus, for starters. Then there’s a brief sequence when he borrows some of the late Jean-Pierre’s clothes, with Martine’s approval, as well as a moment when he hides in Vincent’s car and frightens him as a way to counter Vincent’s physical aggression.
Still, in many ways he is unreadable, above all to those who fancy him.
Later, when someone disappears, Jérémie finds allies in unlikely places. Before the story is over, even the local police hover by Jérémie’s bedside.
Everyone acts toward him with mercy — misericordia — the compassion that sets aside punishment; mercy always gifts the giver as well as the recipient.
Writer/director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger By The Lake) makes Misericordia vaguely sinister from the start, leading us to the village on a winding road through dull countryside — Jérémie’s point of view as he drives back after 10 years away to attend Jean-Pierre’s funeral. The filmmaker continues to cast a cold eye on the proceedings, so to speak; at the same time, the film is often weirdly funny. The plot thickens with the help of locals foraging for mushrooms, for example, and the phallic morels keeps popping up, alleged to grow well in decaying matter … like, maybe a body hidden nearby?
Don’t bury your desires, boys and girls.
Moments of brilliance notwithstanding, the comedy and the dark look at human nature in Misericordia never quite meld. For any student of human nature, that unreliable narrator and the gang of unlikeable characters may eventually wear thin.
Misericordia. Written and directed by Alain Guiraudie. Starring Felix Kyzyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand. In French, with English subtitles. In theatres March 28.