Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024).
In Misericordia (2024), the newest film by Alain Guiraudie, a beautiful stranger, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), journeys back to his hometown to mourn the death of his former mentor, a master baker with whom he was in love. The deceased also happens to be the father of his childhood best friend (Jean-Baptiste Durand), now a baldheaded brute irrationally threatened by Jérémie’s extended sojourn, specifically the company he keeps with his newly widowed mother (Catherine Frot). Guiraudie unfolds an uncanny comic thriller, deceptively subtle in its sensuous subversions of noir templates, against the dewy autumnal backdrop of Saint-Martial, a mountainous commune in the countryside region of Occitanie, where he was raised. With its lonely gravel roads and vast wildernesses, Occitanie’s lush swaths of emptiness, suited for solitary wandering, give each banal moment of human contact a paranoid, dubiously suggestive charge. The region is a recurring setting across much of Guiraudie’s work, and in Misericordia, its atmosphere seems to structure the conditions of reality itself. What begins as an overtly homoerotic small-town rivalry, teeming with provincial repressions and boredom-fueled jealousies, transitions into an increasingly absurd yet ambiently melancholic murder investigation in which mushroom hunting and one particularly horny priest play pivotal roles.
So often in Guiraudie’s work is desire equated with criminality, despite the alternate universes of liberated same-sex eroticism in which his films take place. These internal contradictions—carnal abandon laced with the threat of punitive action—allow the director to pose ethical scenarios freed from the prudish strictures of conventional morality tales. And, for Guiraudie, ethics (and the possibility of sustaining them) are intimately connected to the mysteries of desire, which know no God. With Misericordia, the dark humor of Guiraudie’s previous, somewhat unorthodox feature, Nobody’s Hero (2022)—a divisive take on French Islamophobia—carries over into the director’s more familiar territory of pastoral mysticism. The result is a crepuscular elegy for impossible love that gives palpable expression—and grants absolution—to the inanity, the spontaneity, of our most wayward desires.
I spoke to Guiraudie in person two days after Misericordia’s world premiere in the Cannes Premiere section of the festival. Below is a translation of our conversation.
NOTEBOOK: I read that the film is somehow linked to your teenage years. Your early films in particular explore adolescent desire—I’m thinking No Rest for the Brave (2003)—so I’m wondering how Misericordia, in your mind, departs from your past work.
ALAIN GUIRAUDIE: I’d say it’s quite different. I wanted to work through specifically adolescent fantasies but at a remove, so there’s a village, a sense of homecoming, and this bizarre desire you feel for the mom or dad of your best friend. This happens to people of all ages, but when you’re an adolescent, in particular, you really struggle to pursue things you desire. You fight for the opportunity to have sex. It’s actually something I find quite funny, too.
NOTEBOOK: I have to ask, is the photo of the deceased father—the one that the protagonist Jérémie is obsessed with—is that you? I thought it resembled you.
GUIRAUDIE: [Laughs.] I’d be nuts if I made the hero of my film in love with me. It’s actually a nice old photo of the actor who plays the dead man. To make that album we asked him as well as Catherine Frot for a favorite photo of themselves and voilà. My films have never really shown families this way, actually.
NOTEBOOK: And I don’t think you’ve ever featured religion so prominently either.
GUIRAUDIE: The presence of the church and the priest, all that comes directly from my childhood because I had a pretty religious education. I was born in the countryside. I went to mass and was surrounded by these holy images. I’ve completed several sacraments. I was also interested in broaching the subject because of the great current debate of whether Europe is still meaningfully a Christian continent. If so, what does it mean to claim that when we have Muslim influences? I obviously don’t have anything against Muslims, but the mythologies I was raised with, well, they’re not Greek gods, it’s the Christian God. That’s my territory.
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Your films are typically set in your native region of Occitanie, though I wonder why you chose this particular village, the commune of Saint-Martial.
GUIRAUDIE: Well, I know this town quite well. I’m super familiar with tons of tiny villages from this region, but what made this one truly click was when I was looking at it from the west. I saw how it looked in the mountains in the middle of these hills, which made me think, Yes, that’s good. It’s like a fairytale village. You go inside and, sure, it’s a bit modernized, but it still feels somewhere between the ’70s and today, and that atemporal quality was attractive to me.
NOTEBOOK: Your films don’t typically employ non-diegetic music, but I noticed that at the beginning and end of the film there’s a light score. I saw that you worked with a composer, Marc Verdaguer, who is also the regular composer for one of your producers, Albert Serra.
GUIRAUDIE: It’s actually not the first time I’ve used music, but it is the first time I’ve used music in this way, in that the score blends with the sound of the car motor to create an uncanny vibe. I think there’s another moment in the film when the score comes in to blend with another mechanical sound, but it’s really not supposed to evoke the sound of music; rather, it gives the real, on-screen noise a slightly surreal undertone.
NOTEBOOK: This is the third film you’ve done with cinematographer Claire Mathon. Is there something about the way Claire works that you felt was suited to what you wanted to achieve in the film?
GUIRAUDIE: I wanted to work with Claire again to continue developing what we did on Stranger by the Lake [2013] and Staying Vertical [2016], specifically the way we captured the nighttime. She shoots nights without lighting. We don’t have special equipment and projectors to manage the darkness; we work with it and shoot in the evening and at twilight. And we managed to capture a few images of the full moon, and we even shot some footage using the light from the moon. Claire makes images that have a certain sensuality. The way she captures the fog, rain, and wind…it has a certain fullness and volume.
NOTEBOOK: I love the way you use mushrooms as key plot devices.
GUIRAUDIE: Mushrooms are simultaneously erotic and fantastic and morbid, and there’s this element of renewal that I wanted to evoke, of the rotting body somehow returning.
NOTEBOOK: Are you familiar with mushroom hunting or do you know anything about the science of mushrooms in the region that connects to the way you use them here?
GUIRAUDIE: I didn’t verify anything. [Laughs.] I love to invent these sorts of things, but I’m very pleased to be asked this question because it makes me think my creations might compel people to question reality and consult Google about whether, for instance, mushrooms can grow from dead bodies.
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Cops or some sort of law-enforcing entity are recurring presences in your work. I came to really notice that somewhat recently, with your last film, Nobody’s Hero,in which the jealous husband always seems to pop out of nowhere, and in one of your novels, Now the Night Begins, in which the cops, as if by magic, know where the protagonist is at all times. Here, the cops—and the priest—also seem to appear spontaneously.
GUIRAUDIE: There’s a theatricality to this. People enter scenes even though we’ve never seen them before. They appear, and when we see them, it’s surprising. This natural reaction is something I like to play with. It also makes these characters seem threatening, especially when they’re men. So this works well with thrillers and noirs, these genres in which we must have this feeling of being under threat.
NOTEBOOK: Though there’s always this tension between danger and desire in your work, and a shifting between sexual intimacy and physical aggression. I noticed that Misericordia doesn’t really have a full-fledged sex scene. Instead, there are several fights, all very erotically charged of course. Did these fight scenes have anything in common with the way you’ve directed sex scenes in the past?
GUIRAUDIE: It’s a similar process, yes, but I direct sex scenes entirely on my own, and with these fights, I consulted a stuntman. I told him that I wanted these fights to look very natural. He developed the choreography, and we tested it out, and we tweaked it little by little with the actors to create the final scenes.
NOTEBOOK: You like casting relatively unknown actors in lead roles, and they’re always so marvelous—Félix Kysyl, who plays Jérémie, is no exception. What attracted you to him?
GUIRAUDIE: I only saw him on TV and in some films, but he was only playing very small roles. No one really knew who he was. Anyway, I’ve known about him for almost a decade and have always found him very interesting—I like actors who seem to communicate very complex things through simple, minimalistic gestures. Here, I needed someone who was going to kill his best childhood friend but also have the face of an angel.
NOTEBOOK: I wonder if casting actors whom the public has few preconceptions about adds to this mysterious, beautiful-stranger quality many of your characters seem to possess.
GUIRAUDIE: I determine my casts by the way all the actors fit together, though I think that’s common. So, for instance, we had Félix do scenes with Catherine Frot, and through their dynamic, there were times when she seemed like a strict and unpleasant old woman, a kind of stereotypical widow, but then there were also moments when I found her very childish. With Catherine, I also liked that she’s a known actress but she also has an everyman quality, in the sense that you can stick her in a village and it works, she makes sense there. You couldn’t do that with a star like Isabelle Huppert! I think it was John Ford that said something like “Casting makes up 80 percent of directing.” Likewise, I find that the key to directing actors is actually just finding the right person for the role.
Read all of our Cannes 2024 coverage here.