Melissa Anderson
Humor and humiliation, violence and vulnerability: the chaos of thwarted eros knows no bounds in Alain Guiraudie’s latest.
Félix Kysyl as Jérémie and Jean-Baptiste Durand as Vincent in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
Misericordia, written and directed by Alain Guiraudie,
opens March 21, 2025
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The films of Alain Guiraudie rarely stray from key elements. All of his movies, save one, take place in la France profonde, most in rural areas in the southern part of the country. (The outlier, the terrorist-farce Nobody’s Hero, from 2022, is set in Clermont-Ferrand: a city, but not exactly a bustling metropolis.) The chaos and exhilaration unleashed by desire fuel his oeuvre, in which unconventional couplings (and occasional throuples and foursomes) abound; his sexually active characters—often, though not always, men seeking men—are of a wide variety of ages and body types. But with each new feature, Guiraudie introduces variations on these defining themes, something he achieves with tonic results in his latest, Misericordia, his best film since his stateside breakthrough, the 2013 Hitchcockian cruising-ground thriller Stranger by the Lake.
Misericordia’s opening matches that of Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical (2016): a segment of through-the-windshield shots as the protagonist motors down winding country byways, en route to a village destination in the Occitania region (where the director himself was born). In the current film, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) has traveled from Toulouse to Sauclières, the tiny town he left a decade ago, for the funeral of his cherished former boss and mentor, who ran the local boulangerie. Somewhat adrift—Jérémie has been out of work for three months and is on the verge of breaking up with his girlfriend—he stays on with the baker’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), who’s grateful, at least at first, for the company. Much less pleased is Martine’s son, the hair-trigger-tempered Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), convinced that Jérémie, his childhood friend, has designs on his mother.
Tatiana Spivakova as Annie (center foreground), Catherine Frot as Martine (right), and David Ayala as Walter (far right) in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
Vincent’s irrational thoughts, however, likely have less to do with wanting to protect maman from a cougar chaser than with his own unresolved feelings toward Jérémie. Jealousy, rebuffed advances, confessions of deepest love that go unrequited or that are announced too late: thwarted eros is foregrounded in Misericordia, the rare Guiraudie film to have no fucking (although dongs, in various stages of tumescence, remain de rigueur). Vincent, married to forbearing Annie (Tatiana Spivakova), with whom he has a device-addicted grade-schooler son, seems unable to stop touching the man he sees as a threat to his mother’s virtue. He rouses Jérémie, installed in Vincent’s old bedroom, from sleep in the wee hours—a menacing act accompanied by a hand placed a little too long on Jérémie’s bare chest.
Félix Kysyl as Jérémie and Jean-Baptiste Durand as Vincent in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
That bizarre dyad becomes an even odder triangle with Walter (David Ayala), a semi-retired bachelor farmer and a longtime pal of both men. Walter doesn’t want hotheaded Vincent to know that Jérémie visits him sometimes—but neither does corpulent Walter expect Jérémie to come on to him by slipping into the undershirt and boxer briefs of his much larger buddy and caressing him. Aggressively spurned, Jérémie will later receive an apology from Walter, who wonders why his friend thought he was queer. Jérémie’s pithy response exemplifies Guiraudie’s talent for highlighting the absolute anarchy of desire, which obeys no rigid sexual categorization: “I don’t have to think that to want you.” (Although not as madcap, Misericordia features aperçus about the fluidity of lust that recall those in Guiraudie’s The King of Escape, from 2009, in which a middle-aged gay-guy gerontophile falls in love with a sixteen-year-old straight girl.)
David Ayala as Walter and Félix Kysyl as Jérémie in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
Walter’s are not the only clothes that Jérémie dons. Soon he’s sporting the dead baker’s duds, a way of being closer to the paterfamilias, for whom Jérémie, based on his obsession with a photograph of the deceased looking especially virile in a skimpy Speedo, harbored more than a filial affection. The garment appropriation enrages Vincent further. To avoid additional torment by this lunatic—and perhaps to find a quiet place to make sense of his own roiling emotions about his hometown and the people in it—Jérémie seeks refuge in the forest, foraging morels and porcini. Yet this arcadian spot, much like the idyllic grove where Stranger by the Lake unfolds, is befouled by an act of violence, from which Jérémie will spend the rest of film fabricating plausible alibis to conceal his part in it.
Félix Kysyl as Jérémie in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
As his equivocations grow ever more baroque, Jérémie is filmed more frequently in isolation, a tiny speck moving through a landscape ablaze in autumnal yellows and reds, its awe-inspiring beauty augmented by the widescreen compositions. (Claire Mathon, in her third collaboration with Guiraudie, is the cinematographer.) As his agitation peaks, he finds some solace in the company of the local abbot (Jacques Develay)—who has his own amatory secret. Whereas Guiraudie’s previous films, with their multiple scenes of XXX action, focused on the solemnity and absurdity of sex, the chaste Misericordia emphasizes something more complex: the profound vulnerability of making one’s carnal wishes known, an overture that always runs the risk of crushing humiliation (or worse).
Félix Kysyl as Jérémie and Jacques Develay as the abbot in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
Playing someone who both desires and is desired unidirectionally—his libidinal frustrations illustrative of his shambolic life—Kysyl imbues Jérémie with a fascinating, off-center sexual appeal. With his sideswept bangs and hooded eyes, he suggests a serial seducer in the making, a boy-band dreamboat. But the anxiety and uncertainty that radiate off Jérémie make him a hangdog Harry Styles, at once too eager and too skittish to have his wants reciprocated and too unconfident to keep trying.
Félix Kysyl as Jérémie in Misericordia. Courtesy CMPR.
Others in the film, whose own ardor remains unrequited, will not let rejection dissuade them of their hope. “You’ll learn to love me,” the curate tells his crush with unshakable conviction. As is typical of the filmmaker, Guiraudie locates the humor in all of this unreturned amorous energy, a verve that leads to knottier plot twists—and that, crucially, seems to be the only source of vitality in this moribund hamlet. It’s a life force that the director, a professed atheist, holds sacred. The title of his film is Latin for “mercy,” a concept that most directly applies to absolving Jérémie of his savage deed in the woods. But in a broader sense, it might refer to a more universal compassion for anyone tripped up by their own erotic foibles and failures—which is to say, nearly all of us imperfect beings.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.