This article appeared in the September 13, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2024)

Call it Stranger in the Village. After being away for many years, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he grew up, in southwestern France, on the occasion of a funeral. A zigzag game of desire soon unfolds, as the handsome visitor is lusted over by the widow of the deceased, her son (who was Jérémie’s childhood friend and possibly more), a neighbor with a fondness for pastis, and the local priest. As is common in the sexually fluid world of Alain Guiraudie’s films, attraction is reciprocated more often than not, but never according to normative expectations.

Misericordia finds a compromise between the two structural tendencies of Guiraudie’s oeuvre, which can be divided into minimalist films with a rigorous and cyclical design, such as That Old Dream That Moves (2001) and Stranger by the Lake (2013); and others, like No Rest for the Brave (2003) and Staying Vertical (2016), that are amorphous and apparently guided by oneiric logic. Though the setting here is more expansive than one finds in the films of the first group, encompassing all the characters’ homes and the nearby forest, the narrative is loosely built around repetition, so that the locations merge into a kind of huis clos and the plot assumes the dynamics of a chamber piece. Like in his more unruly works, Guiraudie juggles a variety of tones. The characters’ bumbling attempts at seduction and the way they constantly “happen” to run into each other in the woods are very funny. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of violence that eventually erupts into a shocking murder. Misericordia then turns into a taut pastoral noir, channeling Hitchcock by way of Chabrol, all the while maintaining a comic and surrealist edge, in large part thanks to a pair of investigating police officers who seem magically impervious to locked doors.

The formal playfulness belies a philosophical core. True to the religious implications of its title, evoking the Christian imperative to compassion and mercy, Misericordia slowly reveals itself as an interrogation of individual and collective guilt. It might be the film’s deceptive levity that prevented it from landing in the main competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where instead it played in the noncompetitive, vaguely defined (and generally viewed as uncomplimentary) Cannes Premiere sidebar. Regardless, it turned out to be one of the festival’s strongest titles, and when I met Guiraudie to discuss Misericordia the day after its triumphant premiere, he didn’t appear the least bit bothered by this supposed slight.

Now that Misericordia has embarked on its North American fest tour—it screened at the Telluride Film Festival a couple of weeks ago and at the Toronto Film Festival last week, and arrives at the New York Film Festival in late September—here’s our conversation from last May about the journey of the film from novel to screen, the eroticism of Christianity, the resonances between Misericordia and Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), and why Guiraudie thought of Gaza while shooting the film.

You’ve told me before that your scripts are usually born from novels, which you don’t always publish. 

Or even finish!

You did finish Rabalaïre, which was published in 2021, and it provided the basis for both Nobody’s Hero (2022) and Misericordia. Could you talk about this genesis?

Actually, the two cases are different. With Nobody’s Hero, I worked on the script while I was writing the novel. In the novel, the prostitute and the young Arab are much more peripheral, so these were motifs that I could easily develop further in the film. I began writing the script for Misericordia after the novel had already been published. I thought to myself, “Well, there’s something cinematic about this: the forest, the village…” I wanted to approach it in a different way; literature and cinema are two completely different ways of working for me. In literature—and with Rabalaïre it’s particularly obvious—I work by adding, adding, adding. In cinema, I remove, remove, remove. The novel contains much more than just this story. Jérémie goes to Clermont-Ferrand, he goes home, he comes back, he leaves again, there’s the old man, there is a performance-enhancing aphrodisiac. Here it’s concentrated, uncluttered.

What was your motivation for turning a distilled version of this part of the story into a film?

Another eroticism develops in the film. We’re always seeing someone’s point of view. This was important, and it’s something that we worked on extensively when devising the découpage—it shouldn’t be only Jérémie’s POV; we should share a bit of everyone’s gaze. In the novel, Jérémie is looked at, or he looks, but the eroticism is always centered on him. The film is more choral, so to speak. Something circulates better, more.

As a result, the mise en scène differs from those of your previous films. There’s a greater reliance on close-ups, and you build a lot of the erotic tension, as well as the comedy, through shot/reverse shot sequences. 

I got really close to the characters. I tried to rediscover the subjectivity of how you see someone when you’re close to them. We discussed point of view more than ever before. It was the first film where each time we set up the camera, we would ask ourselves, “Whose point of view is this? Who’s looking at whom?” It has to do with the exploration of desire, the mystery of desire. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the edit I cut out more dialogue than ever before in my films—or at least in a very long time. I really removed a lot. The close-ups are expressive: the moments of silence, the moments of looking.

The silences are also due to the fact that Jérémie is constantly inventing a new story, and he always has to cogitate before answering. And the others, before even asking a question, begin to doubt what he’s telling them. There’s a rhythm that is imposed by his fabrications and by their suspicions. I had the idea that in this film I would only use either very wide shots or very tight shots. I didn’t stick to it, though; I still have some medium shots. [Laughs] But that’s what I had planned.

I have to say that yesterday I was surprised when I saw how people were laughing and applauding during the screening. I got scared because I worried that the finale was going to fall apart, that the film would end in comedy and the closing emotion, which I really wanted to preserve, would completely collapse. I thought that maybe I had overdone the comedy a bit.

Misericordia is a particularly philosophical film—explicitly so, even. When the priest (played by Jacques Develay) talks about our capacity for compartmentalizing injustice, his speech can’t help but feel very contemporary. Was it inspired by the current moment, or is it a more general reflection on the human condition?

I’ll admit that when we were shooting and he says, “We’re all responsible, even if it’s far from home,” I thought a lot about Gaza. But it was written much earlier and these questions of guilt vis-à-vis the world’s misfortune, of conscience and culpability, have been around for a long time: how can I live my life and let this happen? We all manage to let it happen. The priest takes on a lot of my personal troubles, my questions, my inner conflict between tradition and modernity—or rather, my desire to be modern, to have a strong relationship with the present moment, and still live out my desires. In fact, he’s my favorite character, in both the novel and the film.

Although there were religious echoes in your previous films—the lambs and the wolves in Staying Vertical, for instance—this is the first time that you deal with religion head-on. Even the title, Misericordia, is a Christian term. 

I was raised in a Christian environment, and lately it’s been coming back to me. I have a certain fascination with religion as a response to our anxieties about death. And I’ve also become aware—though I think I might already have sensed it when I was very young—of the erotic force of religion. The eroticism of the Catholic religion, after all, is remarkable: the rituals, the clothes, the ornaments, the stained-glass windows, the paintings, the sculptures. It went well with the subject of the film, this quest for a desire that isn’t incarnated—the idea of a desire that wouldn’t be fulfilled by sex. Ultimately, it’s always the same: we make films in order to bring together things that don’t necessarily go together. I think that the eroticism of religion stems from the fact that religion is a response to death, to the anguish of death. Of course, eroticism is linked to death: Eros and Thanatos. In fact, you go round and round in your mind to then come up with things we’ve known about for centuries. [Laughs] It’s crazy—you realize that you’re not inventing anything. On a formal level, you manage to mix things up a bit, so maybe that’s the only real novelty.

One can’t speak of Catholicism, eroticism, and cinema without thinking of Pasolini, and the essential plot of Misericordia—a stranger arrives among a small group of characters and ignites all of their desires—recalls Teorema.

I’ve been hearing this a lot. I understand why, of course, but it’s funny because it never even occurred to me to watch Teorema again. I have a strange relationship with Pasolini; I really admire the man—his poetry, his politics, his relationship with the proletariat, his relationship with cinema—and at the same time I can’t say that I like his films very much. It’s very surprising. You’re right: once you link the three elements, when you consider the mystical-materialist side, my film is right there, very close to his. But Teorema is very theoretical—it is called “theorem,” after all—and for me it remains abstract. Whereas I want my film to come alive, for people to believe in it, for something to really happen between the characters. It shouldn’t just be a pure statement.

Your films, and also your novels, all share the same premise: a man alone against the world. Is this a reflection of your worldview, or is it rather that you conceive of art as a means of confronting your own anxieties?

It’s both. I think that, as a little guy from the countryside, I’m still afraid of the world. There’s always been a fear of the world, but also a desire to discover it. The same is true with regard to other people: I’ve always been torn between fear and desire for other people. Something of that is definitely reflected in my films. My main theme is solitude; I don’t know if it’s a man alone against the world, or if it’s lonely people trying to do something together, for better or for worse, and struggling to find each other. Then again, maybe it’s simply that a man alone against the world is a great cinematic premise.

Translated from French by the interviewer.

Giovanni Marchini Camia is a co-founder of Fireflies Press and a programmer for the Locarno Film Festival.