Mis­eri­cor­dia review – Chabrol would have approved

“Peo­ple seem to think that the final shot explains every­thing when the con­trary is true,” com­ment­ed the late French film­mak­er Claude Chabrol in a mid-1970s inter­view. ​“It’s a ques­tion mark.” Writer-direc­tor Alain Guiraudie seems to share his countryman’s pref­er­ence for ambigu­ous end­ings. His 2013 fes­ti­val hit Stranger by the Lake left its pro­tag­o­nist Franck cow­er­ing in the dark in the woods with his life at immi­nent risk, while his lat­est idio­syn­crat­ic tale Mis­eri­cor­dia also ends in dark­ness and with­out a clearcut resolution.

It begins one autumn with an inscrutable young man Jere­mie (Felix Kysyl) return­ing to a sleepy vil­lage in the Avey­ron region of south­ern France for the funer­al of his for­mer boss, the local bak­er. The latter’s wid­ow Mar­tine (Cather­ine Flot) gen­er­ous­ly allows the vis­i­tor to stay at her house, an offer which antag­o­nis­es her volatile son Vic­tor (Jean-Bap­tiste Durand), who was once close friends with Jere­mie when they were teenagers. And why does the elder­ly priest (Jacques Deve­lay) keep mate­ri­al­is­ing, when­ev­er the new arrival explores the sur­round­ing countryside?

Tak­ing its title from the Latin word for mer­cy, Mis­eri­cor­dia resists straight­for­ward cat­e­gori­sa­tion. There are echoes of Pasolini’s The­o­rem in its premise of a sex­u­al­ly dis­rup­tive out­sider fig­ure impact­ing a com­mu­ni­ty, and also of Chabrol’s numer­ous dis­sec­tions of provin­cial life, in which appear­ances tend to prove deceptive.

Yet Guiraudie suc­cess­ful­ly fash­ions his own sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic world. Music is used spar­ing­ly, and Claire Mathon’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is unshowy. The sto­ry­telling has a delib­er­ate­ly repet­i­tive qual­i­ty: the sleep­less nights; the 4am vis­i­tors to the bed­room; the walks into nature look­ing for mush­rooms. All of which pro­vide both absur­dist humour and a dream­like sen­si­bil­i­ty. Queer desire cir­cu­lates among the var­i­ous char­ac­ters, who also include Wal­ter, a sham­bling lon­er and anoth­er fig­ure from Jeremie’s past. These feel­ings of sex­u­al yearn­ing, which in some cas­es trans­gress taboos and social con­ven­tions, are repressed or dis­placed or even aggres­sive­ly resisted.

By focus­ing even­tu­al­ly on the grow­ing con­nec­tion between Jere­mie and the priest, the film heads off into fur­ther unex­pect­ed ter­ri­to­ry. Moral and philo­soph­i­cal issues are raised around notions of crime and pun­ish­ment. What might for­give­ness entail if a life has been tak­en? Per­haps the cler­ic might be influ­enced by his own per­son­al feel­ings towards the younger man? Yet that doesn’t inval­i­date his query­ing of our col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­i­ty for cat­a­stro­phes around the world and his asser­tion of our pro­found need for love. Ques­tions then rather than answers: one sens­es Chabrol would have approved.