If the movie version of small-town America can be a hotbed of repressed desire, one would expect such one-stoplight burgs to be buried by the sinister layers of carnal corruption in rural France. Or, at least in the fictional commune in Southern France concocted by Alain Guiraudie for Misericordia, a miniscule village that seems to have barely changed in centuries except for its slow decay back into the hillsides. Jérémie (Kysyl) got out once, getting all the way to Toulouse, the nearest big city, but now he’s back for the funeral of his ex-boss, the local baker.
There’s a pastoral seediness to Guiraudie’s story of country folks and their sordid passions. Kysyl plays Jérémie as the former town pretty boy grown up, no longer a glowing teen but definitely the subject of lustful gazes and jealous advances from those that remember him. His boss’ widow (Frot) seems to regard him as a proxy for her late husband, even dressing Jérémie in his ill-fitting clothes. The late man was a bull, and both she and Jérémie linger over a photo of him on the beach in Speedos that hid nothing, while her adult son, Vincent (Durand), can barely hide his conflicted resentment about Jérémie’s return. He’s trying and failing to fill his father’s shoes, and the love-hate aspect of his sporadic wrestling matches with his former childhood friend become more violent. Meanwhile, Jérémie is under the watchful eyes of another old friend, dewy-eyed ex-farmer Walter (Ayala), who constantly plies him with Pastis, all while enduring the lascivious mushroom-related innuendos of the parish priest (Develay).
It’s like everyone has, wants to have, or is desperately trying not to have their way with Jérémie, and he’s quite happy to take advantage of that fact. That’s where Guiraudie’s queer thriller is both intriguing and a little too reserved. Everybody wants something, and each is convinced that they’re the only one weaving carnal intrigues, that they’re outsmarting everyone else. By the end, it’s almost a sex comedy, with the incompetent local cops bumbling through the holes in Jérémie’s increasingly implausible alibis.
After all, the frisson of yearning has been derailed by a crime most heinous, and the once-arrogant Jérémie finds himself at the whim of the desires, repressed or otherwise, of the residents of Saint-Martial. At this point, it becomes a tepid reworking of Joe Orton’s seminal queer black comedy Entertaining Mr. Sloane, but with none of the playwright’s acerbic wit. Moreover, Jérémie is never given the edge of viciousness with which Orton imbued his titular bisexual lothario – instead, Kysyl mixes floppy-haired charm with flop sweat, making him neither villain nor victim. That’s mainly due to Guiraudie’s refusal to be judgmental of his characters and, for the most part, to let them be judgmental of each other. The guiding emotion is jealousy rather than lust, but bar the outbursts from Vincent there’s rarely any real expression of need.
Guiraudie has stated that he wanted to portray the sexual urges of the rural working class with as much debauched nuance as their urban counterparts. Misericordia has therefore been described as at least being in conversation with his 2013 queer murder anti-thriller Stranger by the Lake. Yet whereas that international arthouse breakout relished its moral ambiguity as much as its transgressiveness, Misericordia feels like a big metaphysical shrug, sluggish to the point of lethargy.
This article appears in April 11 • 2025.
