• Misericordia (Miséricorde)

7/15/25 (Tues)

Alain Guiraudie’s quirky black comedy of 2024 initially reminded me of Belle Epoque in its story of a good-looking outsider whose sexual attraction disrupts small-town life. Here, though, the outsider’s intentions may not be so innocent.

Jérémie returns to his rural hometown after many years to attend the funeral of his former employer, the village baker. The widow, though aware that the boy’s relationship with her husband may have been more than platonic – he looks obsessively at a beach photo of her late husband and wears the man’s old clothes – shows an interest in him as well and invites him to stay in her home, urging him to take over the bakery. Meanwhile, her son, a boyhood friend of Jérémie whose past relationship with him is similarly shady, virulently objects to Jérémie’s presence, convinced that he simply wants to sleep with the mother. (It doesn’t help that Jérémie has taken over the son’s old room.) At the same time, the village priest appears unusually attached to the boy as well, and an overweight and disheveled neighbor gets involved in a different way.

As the tensions between them rise, Jérémie is dragged by the son in the middle of the night to a deserted spot deep in the forest, where he is assaulted. In a crazed state, Jérémie ends up killing his friend. He quickly buries the body and straggles back home in the early hours. When the son fails to return, suspicions turn to Jérémie, whose ever-changing excuses don’t help his case. A wary police duo start to follow him, whether in the woods, in his bedroom (in the middle of the night), in his friend’s place, or elsewhere. Jérémie discovers that mushrooms are sprouting unseasonably over the shallow grave, presumably from the nutrients of the decaying dead body (sounds unlikely, but we’ll chalk that up to artistic license), and picks them frequently, which the police don’t fail to notice. In the end, he is supported by the priest in an eye-raising scene (it involves an erect penis), and the widow ultimately welcomes him to her bed, though only allowing him to touch her hand as the film closes.

Whereas the desires in Belle Epoque (set in Spain despite the name) were on full display, here they are reined in. Misercordia, the curious title, evidently means mercy or compassion, but the quality of mercy here is tied to those desires. The mother and priest both desire Jérémie but are prevented from acting on that for different reasons. The scenes with the priest are especially interesting: he switches roles with Jérémie in the confession box and indicates that he knows all about the murder but will keep quiet, and stops the boy from committing suicide by pointing out that it won’t bring the dead man back to life. He helps the boy dig up the body at night and rebury it in the church cemetery, then pretends to be sleeping with him when the police sneak in during the night (that’s where the penis comes in). I recalled the protests against the authorities by the priest in Open City, but the priest’s naked scene here was pretty eye raising. The villagers seem pretty relaxed overall about gay affairs, which struck me as strange even for France, but this one was certainly curious.

The mother’s role is less clear given that she has secretly passed the house key to the police so that they could interrogate Jérémie in his sleep. Still, she practically insists that he stay with her, walks in casually while he’s taking a shower (another frontal nude shot) to pick up his dirty clothes, and she has no objections at the end when he asks to sleep next to her. As with the priest, she’s decided to forgive him, that is, they both allow the boy literally to get away with murder.

I have no idea what the boy’s attempted seduction of the none-too-pretty fat neighbor was all about, including his sudden donning of the man’s clothes. It made no sense in context – the man had nothing to offer in looks, wealth or social status – unless the filmmaker was implying that the boy wanted to conquer everyone for his own ego. The boy succeeded in that sense since the outraged neighbor, who tried to shoot him for the gay advances, later apologized for his outburst. But the scene was out of synch with the rest of the film.

The cast was well chosen. Félix Kysyl was unreadable as Jérémie, keeping his intentions purposely unclear, and David Ayala as the fat neighbor was impressively un-self-conscious about his slovenly looks. I also loved the skeptical policeman and policewoman, who could step right into an episode of Fargo. But the best was veteran Catherine Frot as the mother, who was determined from the start to catch the boy. (That’s totally contradicted by the house key bit, which had suggested she was determined to punish him for her son’s disappearance. That’s a big unexplained flaw in the story.)

The story is questionable in places: the constant wandering around in the middle of the night, the intrusions into bedrooms, the mother’s inconsistent actions, the attempted seduction of the neighbor. I wish the filmmaker had thought these things through more logically. Still, the characters were realistic and the story engaging, and the droll approach to the material was just right. Very enjoyable. But I know one thing: I never want to see a naked priest again.