Misericordia

MISERICORDIA   ***

Alain Guiraudie

2024

IDEA:  Returning to his provincial hometown upon the death of his mentor, a man awakens dormant lust and yearning among the townsfolk.

BLURB:  A small-town thriller in a commensurately minor key, Misericordia mostly exchanges lurid suspense and sensationalism for a series of tender negotiations of desire. Unlike Guiraudie’s international breakthrough, Stranger by the Lake, the film’s erotics take place primarily on the textual level, in the form of crisscrossing longings that are as innocent as they are potentially transgressive. Here, the handful of characters discreetly and openly yearn for each other in a myriad of configurations bound up in sexual lust, envy, and filial affection. At the center of this web is Félix Kysyl’s deceptively angel-faced Jérémie, whose protean, varyingly carnal relationships with his dead mentor, the mentor’s widowed wife and son, a local farmer, and a Catholic priest reflect an undiscriminating array of desiring positions. Ironically, the film is less subversive for how these relationships poke through traditional social boundaries than for how nonchalantly they’re treated within the story. Even in the wake of a murder - something that would typically and destructively drag the community’s dirty laundry into the light - no character, not even the gendarme on his tail, bats an eyelash at Jérémie sleeping with the priest! Framed by misty autumn woods, where a buried body fertilizes a generous crop of phallic morels, Misericordia presents a sardonic pastoral in which morality, religion, and even death itself are putty in the hands of eros.