IFFK 2024|Misericordia Captures A Community Mired In Lust And Secrets

Conventional yardsticks of morality don’t hold up in the cinema of French maverick Alain Guiraudie. His characters freely trespass, transgress and are symbols of everything straying and aberrant in social frameworks. However, his cinema is never speckled by seeing supposed perversions as something to distance the viewer from. You are immersed in the eccentricities, with the filmmaker clearly revelling in them with a dash of caustic humour.

Concurrent to his recurring obsessions, Guiraudie’s new, darkly comic film Misericordia crosses myriad interstices of desire. It moves across public and private configurations of sexual neediness, a chase for reciprocation. Jérémie (Felix Kysyl) returns to the village where he spent his formative years. His mentor, Jean-Pierre, the baker for whom he used to work, has passed. The mentor’s son and Jérémie’s old playmate, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), doesn’t take kindly to his return. As much as Vincent is deeply spiteful towards Jérémie, homoerotic whiffs between them are unmistakable. Vincent suspects him of coveting his mother, Martine (Catherine Frot). He threatens Jérémie to leave their house and get away from the village immediately, but Martine is insistent on him staying. Vincent’s resentment towards Jérémie shades every exchange the two have. But Vincent, who has a wife and kid of his own, also sneaks into his room in the middle of the night and flits around.

Vincent has anger issues. Therefore, the two are almost always on the cusp of a scuffle or they just go for it. Everyone in his family is used to his ways. Things go south when Jérémie can no longer put up with it and lashes back. The spur of the moment burst of rage and its fallout becomes the dramatic axis of Misericordia.

Guiraudie isn’t one to reprimand or remotely judge his characters. In his world, desire races with abandon, skipping past all social dimensions. You won’t find the aggrandizing air of analysing the delicious array of deviances he sets loose in the narrative. Guiraudie has no interest in sociological scrutiny; with a cool detachment, he appraises, re-appraises the shifting tone of a scene.

Across the board, his characters yearn and lust for each other, no scruple side-stepping the design with which we are supposed to view their transgressions that are always played with complete nonchalance. Guiraudie blankets the intent to interactions among the motley characters with ambiguity. Jérémie is the film’s protagonist, but he remains a shadowy, murky presence, whose lingering motivations are stashed away from us. His return to the village sparks a tinderbox of sexual anxieties. Vincent is also pissed at him for making a pass at his best friend, Walter (David Ayala). He almost seems envious of the intimacy that may grow between Walter and Jérémie, should the latter’s moves be successful.

The custodians of order in the film are the police officers, investigating the disappearance of Vincent. They don’t express their outright disdain at Jérémie, the dalliances he may have been involved in. The male officer seems to be casting his net, barging into houses in the middle of the night, probing for clues. However, as obvious and simple the mystery is, it takes a backseat to the web of desire and guilt which limns the narrative mood. To twist matters furthermore, the local priest, Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), offsets any expectations you may have of a traditional religious authority.

Desire in all its rude, dazzling force explodes its way through any rule of decorum. Of what use is respectability and social conduct if they contravene the all-encompassing urgency, reorienting pull of pleasure and attraction. Guiraudie understands that desire obeys its own logic, carving out a separate set of laws rearranging notions of innocence and culpability. Misericordia hinges its greatest pleasures on the unexpected turns the relationship between Jérémie and the priest takes. Who cares about guilt if the dead cannot return? The town, people are in need of love. They are ready to accept it, take it all in whatever guise it adopts. Misericordia is a quietly subversive gem, an irreverent takedown of structures of family, the Church and community.

Misericordia screened at the 29^th International Film Festival of Kerala, 2024.