Alain Guiraudie‘s extraordinary and splendidly twisted new queer noir, “Misericordia,” begins on an extended, snaking, winding drive and ends with a person and a lady, who’re unrelated and single, in mattress, and a lightweight turned out. The French director of “Stranger by the Lake” and “Staying Vertical” reunites with cinematographer Claire Mathon (“Portrait of a Girl on Fireplace”) for a bleakly humorous tragicomedy about how teenage wishes, when left unsublimated, rear their grotesque head into your maturity.
Guiraudie is most celebrated for “Stranger by the Lake,” which Cahiers du Cinema named the most effective movie of 2013 (as they did with “Misericordia” final yr). That movie is a cult basic within the West that almost all millennial homosexual males, even these not proclaiming to be cinephiles themselves, have seen. It was principally homosexual porn wrapped up in a pseudo-murder-mystery a few homosexual cruiser’s unhealthy obsession with a mustached killer of males.
There is homicide additionally on show in “Misericordia,” although it’s handled extra as an inevitability in a comic book chain of occasions involving Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) and his childhood finest pal. Jérémie’s former boss, upon whom he too had an apparently unhealthy fixation, has simply died, and so he returns to the provincial, wood-nestled small city of Saint-Martial to pay his respects.
There, he develops one other fascination along with his boss’ widow Martine (French cinema icon Catherine Trot), and spends a bit of an excessive amount of time lingering over a scrapbook picture of that boss in a speedo. What’s Jérémie’s purpose with Martine? Does he need to fuck along with her, or fuck her, or be her son?
Author/director Guiraudie, a novelist himself, neatly by no means makes Jérémie’s intentions clear, and the 33-year-old Kysyl is brilliantly solid as an actor who seems to be each youthful and older than he truly is. The place he’s existentially in house and time — and can also be not too long ago recovering from a breakup with a lady — is rarely outlined, neither is his sexuality, which turns into a fluid contagion that spreads like poisonous spores from a deathcap mushroom.
Jérémie rekindles a friendship along with his childhood finest pal Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who can also be Martine’s son, although their relationship is extra like brothers on edge, or cousins who wrestle within the forest as a kind of energy recreation, nevertheless it comes with its personal homoerotic cost. Every part and everyone seems to be intercourse in “Misericordia,” together with a large of an alcoholic neighbor named Walter (David Ayala) who’s each creeped out and advised by Jérémie’s advances. When his reestablishing bond with Vincent takes a flip for the lethal, Jérémie is taken below the companionship of a neighborhood priest (Jacques Develay), who gives counsel and secure haven… and a heat mattress.
And there are numerous beds Jérémie hops to and from, significantly as a method to evade the police who suspect him of homicide.
Guiraudie would argue that Jérémie shouldn’t be the one enticing individual in Saint-Martial, however his arrival as actually the most popular one in a very long time is a social disruption on the extent of Pier Pasolini’s “Teorema,” the place the extremely popular Terence Stamp is each a Christlike determine and a sexual menace who annihilates a bourgeois household’s already precarious buildings. One hilarious scene reveals the priest with a really massive erection, an odd picture that demonstrates Guiraudie making an attempt to indicate somebody who’s in any other case lower off from want having an unavoidable bodily response to it.
“Misericordia” is in regards to the unavoidability of our wishes and their harmful energy. Guiraudie is our keenest, canniest director to carry male longing and its fallouts and bodily particulars again to film screens. This masterful new movie isn’t fairly the shock “Stranger by the Lake” was for a lot of — with unsimulated intercourse scenes and a marrying of queer like to criminality — however there’s one thing cozy about “Misericordia” that, even in its most profane moments, leaves you with a figuring out grin shared by the film itself.
The movie’s unique title in French, “Miséricorde,” interprets to one thing like divine mercy. Lots of people present Jérémie mercy even when he can’t, and like even his grimmest movies, Guiraudie reveals it to his viewers, too. What a miracle of a film.
Grade: A-
“Misercordia” premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant and opens in theaters from Sideshow/Janus on Friday, March 21.
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