Back to selection
“I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia
Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in Misericordia In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016).
A kind of rural riff on Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Misericordia begins innocently enough with Jérémie arriving in Saint-Martial, a commune in southwest France, where the funeral for his late boss, a baker, slowly reveals itself as a pretense for this mysterious outsider’s extended homecoming. Everyone, including Martine (Catherine Frot), the baker’s widow, and Walter (David Ayala), a childhood friend, seems happy to have Jérémie back—everyone, that is, except Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), the baker’s son, whose aggressive behavior suggests that he and Jérémie share an unspoken, perhaps illicit, past.
Misericordia is a film that flirts with many genres. While the story involves a killing—and, in a masterfully controlled sequence set in the woods, the hiding of the victim’s dead body—its tone frequently belies such macabre subject matter. Jérémie, for one, is an object of intense desire, leading to a variety of seriocomic encounters with Martine, Walter, and, most memorably, Father Grisolles (Jacques Develay), a local priest who morally justifies the murder in an effort to satisfy his own urges. Meanwhile, a pair of clodhopping cops straight out of Bruno Dumont’s recent comedies show up to solve the crime but mostly look on dumbfounded as everyone involved turns a blind eye to the murderer in their midst. As in many of Guiraudie’s films, guilt hangs heavy over the proceedings, though here it’s no mere theme, but the driving force behind every dramatic twist and humorously salacious come-on—proof that this most inventive of directors can not only rework an established formula, but also channel his obsessions into something fresh and unpredictable.
Shortly after Misericordia’s premiere at Cannes, I sat down with Guiraudie to discuss the film’s provocative mix of moral, religious, and sexual concerns. The film makes its US premiere at NYFF and will be released by Sideshow Film and Janus Films.
Filmmaker: What can you tell me about the village where the film was shot? Does it have any personal significance for you?
Alain Guiraudie: No, it’s a village I only found out about ten years ago. I used to drive through it occasionally. When I was writing the script I thought, “That could work quite well for this story.” But it’s not where I was born, and I don’t have any family there. In fact, it’s quite far from where I live—about 150 kilometers away.
Filmmaker: How do you typically generate ideas for your films? Do you often return to a certain process?
Guiraudie: It’s difficult to really know how an idea for a film emerges. I know that for Stranger by the Lake and Staying Vertical, for example, the ideas came specifically from the settings. For this film, it came from a novel I published a few years ago [Now the Night Begins, 2018]. I often base my research on novels, or I start writing and what I’m working on becomes either a novel or a script. There’s quite a lot in the film about childhood, and teenage years, and it’s not by chance that the story centers on a young man who kills a childhood friend. This brought me back to a lot of memories of my teenage years.
Filmmaker: From what I understand the book deals with a murder. Is that correct?
Guiraudie: Yes, there’s also murder in the book, and also a priest who is in love with the murderer. So the initial situation is similar, but then the film goes in many different directions, and the evolution of the story is quite different. Also, the book is much longer and has many more details. The film is really only about one aspect of the book.
Filmmaker: I’m curious what drew you back to the subject of murder and the thriller genre, and how that might relate to the theme of guilt that runs through your work?
Guiraudie: I’ll start with the theme of guilt, because it’s quite clear to me that that comes from my education, my background, because I was born and raised Catholic—I went to mass, I took communion, etc. I think it’s all really rooted in my Catholic origins—guilt, forgiveness, all of that. I lived through those concepts. For me, guilt is about asking ourselves how we want to live our lives, and to what extent we are responsible for all the issues in the world, all the unhappiness. Can and should we do something about it? As it relates to the film: Should we put a person who has killed another person in prison, knowing that it will not bring back the person who has been killed? Here, the murderer is not that dangerous—he’s most likely not going to kill again. So, does it make sense to have this kind of reaction? The film is really about moral questions we have been asking ourselves as humans forever.
As for thrillers, I’ve always been interested in genre cinema: Westerns, noirs, films from America. My love for cinema was really generated by cinema itself, and the big stories that are capable of being told through it. In my more noirish films, like Misericordia, I like the idea of adding a murder to the plot, because when you do, the story necessarily becomes more complicated, and the relationships between the characters almost automatically become more tense.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about how your collaboration with Claire Mathon has developed over the years, what she brings to your work that’s unique from other cinematographers, and what made you want to work with her again after a short break with Nobody’s Hero (2022)?
Guiraudie: Claire brings her eye, her rigor. I had never ruled out working with her again. I very quickly thought that Misericordia was a film for her. I knew I wanted to film at night again, and without artifice, continuing the work we did on Staying Vertical. There always remains for me a great deal of mystery in the work of photography, in the sensuality that a cinematographer can convey. I still don’t really know how that happens, but I think it has to do with desire—the desire of the world. I think that with Claire, we both share our desire to take on the world head-on.
Filmmaker: To go back the theme of morality, I’m wondering if you can talk about the priest character and how he uses religion, or at least his standing in the community, to justify Jeremie’s actions in order to get closer to him. Do you think the film is critical of religion?
Guiraudie: The film is not really a critique of religion in general. It’s more about questioning oneself about what is moral and how you show that in the world. Because it’s something we can all interpret in different ways, and decide what works for us. It’s true that morality needs to be shared by a community in order to create guidelines, but at the same time we can use our common sense to feel what’s moral for us. I particularly like the character of the priest—actually, he’s my favorite character, because he can really reconcile these things. He’s progressive, open-minded and flexible in the way he thinks compared to the community he’s in, which is very backward. But he’s also a man, and he finds ways to deal with his desire. I like that he has a balance between these two aspects of his life and personality; he’s not excessive in any way.
Filmmaker: I found the relationship between food, drink, and desire in the film to be quite fascinating. Do you find that these elements relate at all?
Guiraudie: There actually aren’t many scenes of eating in the film, though there is food and, yes, a lot of drinking. For me that’s more related to being welcoming, to receiving friends, and sharing time together—the pleasure of being together. Although sometimes alcohol does spark difficult conversations, especially for Jeremie, who’s being questioned all the time. If it also generates desire, I don’t think it’s necessarily a desire of the other, but more a desire to simply be with the other.
Filmmaker: Misericordia plays with genres familiar to your past work (thriller, noir, etc.), but it’s also very funny. I heard many people at Cannes arguing whether it was a comedy or not. How conscious were you of the humorous aspects as you developed the story? Or is this something that grew once you began working out the scenarios with the actors?
Guiraudie: The humorous aspects were in the script. I often look for a mixture of comedy and tragedy, of darkness and the desire to be in the world. Let’s just say I didn’t expect it to make people laugh so much, but I think the Cannes screening was quite exceptional for that. People really wanted to laugh.
