French writer-director Alain Guiraudie serves up a darkly funny murder mystery where lust and lies go hand in hand.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith would find much to like in “Misericordia,” a French crime thriller set in the fictional village of Saint-Martial in the southern Occitaine region from writer-director Alain Guiraudie. Set in the same area in Southern France as Guiraudie’s 2013 entry “Stranger by the Lake” (and also Guiraudie’s birthplace), “Misericordia’ (the title is Latin for “mercy”) has received eight Cesar nominations. It is another crime drama suffused with homoerotic and (in this case) heterosexual sexual longing. However, in “Misericordia,” the natural landscape comes alive and becomes an accomplice in all that occurs. The almost omnipresent wind blows equally on everyone.
The catalyst for the action is the death of a local baker, the owner of the village’s single boulangier-patisserie. The man’s widow Martine (French treasure Catherine Frot) is happy to see the film’s young protagonist, her husband’ former apprentice baker Jeremie (a charismatic Felix Kysyl), who has graduated to a larger baking company in Toulouse. Jeremie, who resembles a debauched choirboy, has come home for his mentor’s funeral. But he has no family left in the area. Martine notably takes him in and lets him stay with her in her home after the funeral. This does not sit well with her brutish son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), once a friend of Jeremie’s, but now his enemy and rival. Vincent believes that Jeremie is “sniffing around” his still attractive mother, looking to take advantage of her.
Also confused by Jeremie’s lingering presence is the husky Walter (David Ayala), another former friend who lives in a house on his late parents’ farm, although Walter does not farm himself. Both Vincent and Walter make a point of asking Jeremie, who is in his late 30s or early 40s, why he has no wife, girlfriend, or children. We surmise that Jeremie is gay, and so does the village’s benevolent priest L’abbe Philippe Grisolles (a terrific Jacques Develay), who wanders the windy, densely forested hills and mountains, hunting for mushrooms. When Vincent goes missing, his wife, Annie (Tatiana Spivakova), Father Philippe, and Martine gather together, sipping pastis and testing theories about what happened.
Suspicion falls upon Jeremie, whose tale concerning his and Vincent’s whereabouts at the time Vincent went missing grows increasingly complex and dubious. The sexual tension between Jeremie and Vincent, Walter, and even Father Philippe is palpable. But the strongest undercurrent of desire is between Kysyl’s Jeremie and Frot, whose Martine nonetheless must realize that Jeremie may have murdered her son. The web gets even more tangled when the local gendamerie gets belatedly involved, and one dogged gendarme (Sebastien Faglain) even tries to interrogate Jeremie while he is asleep.
The widescreen color imagery in Misericordia by cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Stranger by the Lake) is spooky, lush, and immersive. We spend quite a lot of time inside a dark forest, where ancient trees lurk and bodies are buried. One such body appears to stimulate the growth of macabre, out-of-season morels upon his shallow grave. Understandably, Jeremie has a hard time swallowing pieces of an omelet made with the morels. It’s a Communion of a very twisted and guilty sort. If any recent film deserves to be described using the modifier “Hitchcockian,” it is this little, dark, French gem. We also find the sexually fraught frissons we associate with the work of aforementioned masters Simonen and Highsmith. The architecture of the village appears to feature walls left by Roman conquerors. The weathered stone bench in front of Martine’s house looks archaeological. Some of the male nudity will shock. Wind, rain, and sun cycle over and over.
As it turns out, Jeremie was in love with Martine’s late husband when Jeremie was his apprentice. Father Philippe has no qualms whatsoever about explaining his sexual orientation to La Gendarmerie. Someone wants to dig up a body a la “The Sopranos” and relocate it to a more suitable, perhaps more secretive place. Waiting for the priest, Jeremie sits inside the village church, where we see the Stations of the Cross, the altar, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, widely-known symbols we must reconcile with the spiritual health (or lack of) of the faithful and unfaithful alike. Morels, anyone?
‘Misericordia’
Rating: R, profanity, violence, graphic male nudity. In French with subtitles
Cast: Feli Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand
Director/Writer: Alain Guiraudie
Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay, AMC Braintree, AMC Liberty Tree Mall, and others
Grade: A-
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