Marking a welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific “Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie provides the Cannes Premiere part certainly one of its darkly glowing standouts with the unsettlingly offbeat “Misericordia.” Within the director’s greatest work, Guiraudie’s trademark is to infuse style dalliances with mordant wit and a deliciously peculiar, defiant queerness. And whereas it might initially seem like simple — and whereas it fortunately avoids the wild tonal swings of muddy tragicomedy “Staying Vertical” (2016) and somewhat baffling terrorism sex-farce “No person’s Hero” (2022) — no person may ever accuse this more and more twisted psychodrama of enjoying it straight.
From the beginning, there’s one thing off. The prologue is a driving sequence, shot from the viewpoint of the unseen driver, by the narrowing nation roads of hilly southwestern France. There’s nothing overtly odd happening, even the panorama is banal, shot in hazy earth tones by Claire Mathon’s intelligent, unromanticized digital camera. However one thing within the absolute silence from the motive force (no buzzing, no automobile radio) and on this stretch of Marc Verdaguer’s vaguely sinister rating is harking back to a Hitchcock following scene, delivered with the cool precision of Claude Chabrol. It looks like there’s malice right here, or a least an uncanny absence of kindness.
The impression is dispelled, nonetheless, at journey’s finish. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a well mannered younger man with a boyish, obliging air, has returned to the small city the place he spent his teenage years, to attend the funeral of Jean-Pierre, the baker for whom he used to work. He’s met warily by his previous playmate Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), Jean-Pierre’s son, however extra warmly by Vincent’s mom Martine (Catherine Frot), the brand new widow. She insists, over Jérémie’s obvious reluctance to intrude, that he stays along with her in the home above the bakery, within the bed room that was Vincent’s earlier than he received married and began a household of his personal.
The roots of Vincent’s animosity quickly turns into clear: He suspects Jérémie of wanting to place the strikes on his still-attractive mom. In the meantime, Martine believes that Jérémie had truly been in love along with her lifeless husband. However then, the primary particular person Jérémie makes an overt go at is Vincent’s greatest pal Walter (David Ayala), a rotund loner, keen on pastis, who lives by himself in his household’s previous home and appears to take pleasure in not working or participating with the world very a lot. Vincent and Jérémie’s relationship can also be underlain with a homoeroticism that crackles by their wrestling matches and thru Vincent’s behavior of displaying up on the first light to hover by Jérémie’s mattress. Add into the combination a neighborhood priest, Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), an avid mushroom-forager whose earthly passions are enflamed to a really unpriestly diploma by the brand new returnee, and you’ve got a heaving, mulchy mass of sexual risk for Jérémie to navigate. Who will he seduce or be seduced by? Why not all of them, à la “Teorema”?
A grubby little homicide happens within the forest close by, sophisticated by the somewhat fantastic element that much-sought-after morels apparently thrive on soil nourished by decomposing human stays and can pop up in a single day within the form of the shallow-buried sufferer. Or maybe that’s simply the guilt get together’s fancy, like a fungal model of “The Inform-Story Coronary heart,” merely one other pink herring designed to progressively unpick our personal preconceptions about guilt and innocence and bumpkinhood on this unusual village.
Abetted by a brilliantly solid set of oddballs, from Vincent along with his Fifties prizefighter body to the unkempt Walter along with his soiled undershirt straining throughout his stomach to Martine along with her air of stylish sexual worldliness to Father Philippe who hides his pleasure beneath his cassock, there hasn’t been a extra exaggeratedly eccentric imaginative and prescient of French provincialism since Bruno Dumont established his “Li’l Quinquin” universe.
And so our pure sympathies are redirected and redirected once more because the comparatively participating and telegenic Jérémie turns into the Guiraudie equal of an unreliable narrator. “Misericordia,” we finally notice, between the absurdist gags about sexuality and the sardonic sideswipes at spiritual hypocrisy, doesn’t comply with a fish trying to swim in unfamiliar waters, nor even an out-of-towner cat set free amongst the native pigeons. As an alternative it’s a slippery, changeable parable a few notably amoral cuckoo seeking to feather a brand new nest.
