French cinema is full of melodramas in which various characters lose their minds over some desirable nymphet. They're usually played for laughs (Gemma Bovery), but sometimes for thrills (One Deadly Summer). With Misericordia, writer/director Alain Guiraudie mines this setup for both black comedy and even darker thrills, delivering a devilishly queer take on a Gallic storytelling staple.
As is usually the case with such fare, Misericordia takes place in a quiet provincial village, where the locals' idea of a good time is to go hunting for mushrooms in the nearby woods. The village's harmony is disrupted by the return of Jeremie (Félix Kysyl) for the funeral of his former employer, the town's baker, with whom it's implied he may been romantically involved. After the funeral, Jeremie is persuaded to stick around for a while by the dead man's widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), who hopes he might take over her late husband's bakery. Martine's son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), once a childhood friend of Jeremie's, is none too happy with this arrangement, believing Jeremie intends to sleep with his mother. Jeremie actually has his sights set on Walter (David Ayala), a corpulent man-child who lives alone on a rundown nearby farm.
Refusing Vincent's Wild West sheriff-esque orders to leave town by dawn, Jeremie ends up in a homoerotic grappling bout with Vincent in the woods, which takes a nasty turn when Jeremie bashes his old friend's head in with a rock. Returning to town with a flimsy alibi about spending the night in a barn, Jeremie finds himself fending off the attentions of the local police, and the sexual interests of village priest Philippe (Jacques Develay).
Far from a young Adjani or Bardot, Kysyl is a rather unremarkable looking thirtysomething man, hardly the sort you would expect to inspire widespread lust among men and women alike. But it's in contrasting the averageness of Jeremie with the grotesquerie of oddball inhabitants of the village (most of the cast look like they stepped out of one of Bruno Dumont's condescending portrayals of small town France) that sells this idea. Now based in the city of Toulouse, where he claims to run his own bakery, Jeremie represents sophistication to these bumpkins. And he knows it, using the locals' inferiority complexes against them, particularly the police, represented by a bumbling gendarme (Sébastien Faglain) trying his best not to appear shocked by Jeremie's open homosexuality.
As you might expect from its scenario, Misericordia draws on Hitchcock, cleverly subverting the setup of I Confess by making the murderer the one wrestling with guilt and the priest the figure who persuades him not to turn himself in. This reversal is represented by Philippe dragging Jeremie into his confession box for the priest to deliver a confession to the layman. Of course, Philippe uses this to blackmail Jeremie into becoming his secret lover.
It's as dark a scenario as they come, but Guiraudie mines humour through the growing absurdism of it all. One of the most blackly comic touches sees the mushrooms Jeremie has been searching for in vain finally sprout up through the soil in which he buried his victim. Amid all this human awfulness, nature finds a way to prosper, and the feckless Vincent finally brings something of value to the world, his rotting remains nurturing the mushrooms that end up in his mother's omelette. It's an irony of which the most fiendishly gifted crime writers would be proud.
Directed by: Alain Guiraudie
Starring: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, Jean-Baptiste Durand, David Ayala, Sébastien Faglain
