What’s plucked from the dirt can’t come clean no matter how hard it’s washed out. The heart of Alain Guiraudie’s new comedic thriller, “Misericordia,” is rotten, beautiful and certainly pulled from a soil that can never be discarded.
“Misericordia” follows a young man named Jérémie as he returns to his small hometown Saint-Martial after his former boss dies. Jérémie stays with the widow of his boss, which angers her son until the tensions boil over, and the whole town starts falling apart at the seams.
Guiraudie is a mischievous filmmaker. The central tensions at the heart of “Misericordia,” which he wrote and directed, are deeply knotty and often unspoken for long stretches of time. His preoccupations with death and desire are quite apparent as the two often overlap and lead to erotic and disastrous results alike.
Within this very small town of Saint-Martial, Guiraudie builds a whole world. Everybody knows each other, therefore, a glance can be treacherous, and secrets are never safe with neighbors this nosy. Shot on location, the film makes the most of its claustrophobic exteriors and interiors contrasted against the vast expanses of forests and hills wherein many mushrooms grow and secrets fester.
The town itself, wherein all secrets are kept close to the chest, is rendered as an emotional maze, which turns quite literal through hilariously labyrinthian Benny Hill-esque evasions of each other. Meanwhile, the seemingly endless space of nature, always feeling mystic and atmospheric, is where truth comes to the fore yet where it’s buried deep below the earth.
Guiraudie takes great joy in slowly twisting, turning and revealing the hearts of the film’s tensions at his own pace — a pace which may unsettle audiences and test patience — but the wavelength that he’s operating on is really worth tuning into. It’s one with a world-weary demeanor and a wry sense of humor that brings as many laughs as it does gasps as various characters’ true desires and pasts are revealed. Guiraudie’s patient and determined direction shines in his cast’s perfectly tuned performances, which sell some very violent tonal shifts.
His ensemble is exceptional, and Félix Kysyl is a knockout as Jérémie, the film’s center of gravity. Kysyl has an unreadable sphinx-like quality about him, which lends itself to the extremes of Guiraudie’s shocking script. Catherine Frot and Jean-Baptiste Durand are a dynamic duo as mother and son, but Jacques Develay walks away as the movie’s secret weapon, the local priest with quite unorthodox methods.
This smattering of absolute characters is what makes the film a joy to watch. Every performance is unpredictable and the characters are so wholly rendered by the cast and Guiraudie that even the most taboo and absurd revelations still work. Those revelations come at the end of mysteries unraveled so slowly, like threads that are pulled at until they fray.
The patience Guiraudie takes with his script is the same patience that its characters take with each other until they snap. Little moments drive heart rates up here. There is no pulse-pounding, only quiet and witty spikes that revel in the absurdities of the human condition and just how far people will go to fulfill their desires. “Misericordia” opens at the Roxie on Friday, April 4.
