By Matthew Moorcroft

Strong Recommendation

• Directed by Alain Guiraudie
• Starring Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, Jean-Baptiste Durand
• Not Rated

Immediately from the onset, Misericordia is bizarre. Not just in the usual “oh you quirky French” kind of way – though there is definitely a bit of that – but also in that something is very clearly off about this otherwise idyllic small French town. Our lead, Jérémie, is here for the funeral of his boss, but otherwise appears to not necessarily want to leave. He’s staying at the house of his widow, and her son seems to hate his guts for reasons that aren’t really clear, though something must have happened back in the day. And everybody seems guilty about it, something the local priest seems to keep reminding people with his entire presence.

Director Alain Guiraudie, whose previous work blended sexually charged eroticism with Hitchcockian vibes, finds some layer of interest in exploring the inherent guilt that comes with sexual repression. Everybody here wants some kind of intimacy – whether it be sexual or platonic – but nobody is willing to commit. Instead, it pushes characters to take shots at one another, especially as rumors begin to persist about the intentions of Jérémie. What is he truly after? Love? A hookup? Or maybe he’s actually in need of a mother/father figure? It’s never clear, and I think that’s by design. Jérémie is a blank slate for us to not just place ourselves with whatever kind of emotional baggage we personally have, but also place whatever we think he has.

A lot of this is achieved by a strong Félix Kysyl, who is utterly brilliant here in how he makes Jérémie constantly difficult to get a read on. It’s always tough to have a protagonist as distant and unreadable as this but Guiraudie is the master of making his characters almost impossible to really get a full read on unless you look between the margins. And in between those margins you find a lot more then just a soul desperately looking for some kind of affection in a world that gives him none; you find a whole town of people seemingly unable to get over whatever deep seeded trauma and guilt that lingers inside of them.

It’s honestly sounds bleaker then it actually is, which is still pretty bleak to be fair. Misericordia‘s darkly funny tone is only really matched by how little resolution it actually gets. Everything just kind of gets worse off for everybody, even if they do find a little bit of equilibrium within the sad events of the day. And everybody sort of just knows what happened as well – whether or not they choose to act on it is a different matter entirely. After all, it’s better to live in bliss and ignorance then confront the horrible truths from the past.

Guiraudie’s strong direction is only really matched here by Claire Mathon’s phenomenal cinematography, which makes it look like it’s always raining even when it isn’t. Guiraudie’s love of noir is evident here in how the night scenes almost look too dark to see through, like the center of a black hole that threatens to swallow our characters whole. I especially love the backlights in this, which are simply just divine at points; sometimes all you need on screen is one small light as opposed to a bunch of them, it will get the job done.

Misericordia won’t really be for everyone, which is totally fine. No film really should be; if they were, we still wouldn’t have heated discussions about it years and years after the fact. But Misericordia is a film worthy of that discussion, constantly engaging in it’s questions and enthralling in it’s best moments with it’s only real fault being it’s middle portion spinning it’s wheels longer then I’d like. But for those who are looking for something that’s a great mix of sexy and darkly hilarious, this should more then suffice. After all, nobody does it better then those pesky French.