TIFF '24: "Misericordia" interrogates the meaning of mercy

by Cláudio Alves

When talking about the four French Oscar finalists, one point of the quartet felt perpetually overlooked. Much was said about Emilia Pérez, the eventual selection, and plenty of discussion on All We Imagine as Light, its international provenance and potential as an unlikely Indian or Luxembourgian submission. Then, of course, there was the big-budget wannabee blockbuster of the lot, a new Count of Monte Cristo adaptation that secured US distribution and announced a fortuitous late-year release date hours before Audiard's musical stole its thunder. In the middle of all this commotion, Alain Guiraudie's Misericordia slipped by unnoticed. A shame, since it's one of the year's most beguiling films…

Everybody wants Jérémie. That's not necessarily a comedic setup or some erotic curse. It's merely a fact of life, as so many things are. Looking at him, it's both easy to understand the appeal and difficult to get the zeal of desire. Lithe and twink-bodied, Félix Kysyl plays him like a cipher, perpetually downbeat with raccoon-like dark circles around the eyes. Visage puffed up, his state could insinuate some great crying happening off-screen, but it's hard to imagine this man shedding a tear. Even so, he's in mourning, returning to the little hamlet he once called home to pay respect to a former boss and father of Jérémie's forgotten best friend, Vincent. 

The film opens with a ghostly car ride, the camera watching the landscape go by but never the driver. Within, Jérémie travels the road away from the city and into nowhere. Well, that nowhere has the name of Saint-Martial but the other moniker feels just as appropriate. It's also more in tune with Alain Guiraudie's dispassionate framing, a dry sort of observation that's as exemplary of the director's stylistic depuration as the actor's stone-faced non-reactions. Only Jean-Baptiste Durand seems to break the norm as Vincent, always ready to project his annoyance in brutish fashion, a grunt past the threshold of Guiraudian anti-demonstrativeness.

Then again, his frustrations are easy to see and swiftly understood. As soon as Jérémie drops by, the newly widowed Martine receives him with open arms, eager, almost giddy, to house the young man in her son's old bedroom. In the moment of grief, the woman seems more predisposed to coddle this outsider than Vincent, prompting much paranoia and grand theories of a sexual connection between the two. Moreover, the brute projects an inchoate want for his friend of yore, oft mistaken or mingled with hatred. Fights are platonic fucking, and exchanged clothes read like seduction, yet Jérémie refuses to give Vincent the attention he wants.

Or maybe what he wants is a reaction, and any kind will do—just something to break the cold spell over the town and its new guest from the city. Vincent eventually gets what he wants, though he probably didn't yearn for his own murder. Even then, Jérémie is an inscrutable presence, his behavior surging with no discernible motivation and no emotional outburst either. This is the way things are. And now, there's a body to hide under the blanket of leaves that fall left over the forest floor. If only those pesky mushrooms didn't insist on sprouting, out of season, from Vincent's secret tomb. Morels mark the spot like tiny erections, snitching on Jérémie to the priest Walter who, every morning, forages for fungal delights.

Other filmmakers might get to this situation and unfold the remaining film in the style of a Hitchcockian thriller, dialing up the suspense of a guilty man on the run from justice. France's most beloved novelist turned filmmaker has other plans, however. The slippering away from legal consequences under the police's suspicious eye still takes place, but it's more comedic in tone. If one must compare Misericordia to Hitchcock, then the only appropriate reference should be The Trouble with Harry, a fellow autumnal postcard where murder occurs and none of the characters seem to react how one would expect, all dry humor and casualness.

The mechanism foments feelings of absurdity, disconnecting human behavior from the viewer's frame of reference until there might as well be aliens on screen rather than the residing facsimiles of personhood. Yet, by pushing away, the filmmaker can pull the audience back in, forcing an engagement between them and the dramatized action. Passivity only leads to astonishment, while an active viewership may make one question why certain choices feel so strange in the first place. Hitchcock remains in the land of dark, dry comedy, but Guiraudie wants a more profound engagement, revealing a commanding worldview of radical humanism. 

You'll laugh with Misericordia, you'll lust along with its characters and even partake in what initially reads like amorality. But in the end, you may end up asking yourself the meaning of the titular mercy and why its manifestation should irk. Are we so obsessed with punition that its rejection feels wrong? Why does kindness read like the contrary of justice within the parameters laid out by the social contract? Guiraudie proves himself the king of subversion without breaking a sweat or calling attention to his achievement, always modest behind the camera and downright unwilling to judge the characters that a more mainstream public might deem perverse. 

In this and other ways, Alain Guiraudie's cinema is the essence of queerness distilled into its concentrated form, ready to be proffered to the viewer as a shot you down with conviction. The chaser is a swirl of sweet venom, enough to disturb the body but not to kill it outright. If you need a balm to such an assault, Claire Mathon's got you covered with a smart lensing that finds a rainbow of chromatic possibilities in the same woodsy area. From crackles of twilight gold to the icy blues of morning light, the indigo of nocturnal passions, a greenish air for an uneasy reprieve, the cinematographer proves herself a magician of equal power to her director. If his formal rigor can become a tad dull, she's always there to ensure one doesn't lose sight of Misericordia's pleasure principle. Beauty prevails in an ugly world, and mercy wins out.

After TIFF, where it played as a Special Presentation, Misericordia will bow at the NYFF. Sideshow and Janus Films have distribution rights for the film in the US.