Alain Guiraudie’s breakout film Stranger by the Lake was all about murder and sex. His latest Misericordia is all about murder and the absence of sex. But the lack of anything explicit is somehow more titillating, making brawls between men ooze big-time sensuality. “I work on love scenes and fight scenes in the same way. Fights have an erotic dimension to them,” Alain Guiraudie told me shortly before a screening of the film. “In movies like mine, when there’s two boys fighting, sex is what we’re thinking about.”
Starring puckish Félix Kysyl, Misericordia tells the story of Jérémie, a city-dweller returning to his quaint village for the funeral of his former boss. While there, he butts heads with the boss’s son, and boyhood crush/rival, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), has a will-they-won’t-they with Vincent’s mother Martine (the illustrious Cathérine Frot), all while fighting off advances from the town’s priest (Jacques Develay). Around halfway through, tragedy strikes, and Jérémie is forced to struggle with this interpersonal mess under the scrutiny of the townsfolk and the bumbling police’s heightened suspicion.
This is where Misericordia comes into its own: it’s a whodunnit, but everybody knows whodunnit—and nobody cares. In fact, everybody wants to sleep with the person whodunnit. It’s an absurdist tale that draws upon French tradition through fables with moral focuses and modern cinema with Lynchian, Bunũelish dreaminess (two of Guiraudie’s noted inspirations).
Misericordia is also a love letter to the manly, hirsute kind of working-class figure Guiraudie grew up around, and who he had some of his first crushes on. “I like older men, comfortable men, big, cheap men,” said Guiraudie—the kind who serve as Jérémie’s unconventional objects of desire, like his gruff neighbor Walter (David Ayala). “We have to resist the idea that sensuality, sexuality, homosexuality would only concern young people who live in big urban centers, in Paris and New York,” he said, “because, in the end, it also happens elsewhere. I tend to think that homosexual desire is what connects me to this world.”
Misericordia is now playing at the IFC Center and Lincoln Center in New York City.
This interview was originally conducted in French and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Many of your films take place in the south of France. Could you talk about the importance of this region to you?
It’s where I was born, and where I grew up, and where I became a man. I was born in the countryside, I was born among peasants, and we’re very attached to our land. My Toulouse friends, they would not live outside of Toulouse. They aren’t peasants at all, but I think the countryside matters a lot to them too. I have a really strong attachment to the countryside of the South, but I don’t film on the land where I was born or where I live. I film in places where I think nature is very beautiful. It’s also landscapes and places that I focus on.
Nature is so present and powerful, almost acting as its own character, in your films Misericordia and Stranger by the Lake. Is this a conscious choice?
I’ve heard that a lot, especially in regard to Misericordia. I think it’s the first time I’ve been told that. But do I consider nature a character? I certainly attach a lot of importance to the concept. You could say that it is a character in the sense that I imagined the film while thinking of the forest. [For Stranger by the Lake,] I imagined the film thinking of the lake, but not necessarily the lake I shot in. I thought of a lake. I think it becomes a character for the audience, because it also contributes to the sensuality of the film. A forest and a lake are very sensual elements. Add the wind, the leaves moving, there’s something to that. When I make a film, I attach a lot of importance to the place, because I do have desire for places. I want to embrace the world and to embrace the body. I think I have the same relationship to nature as I have with my characters.
You make a point to show the desire between men who are not young or conventionally attractive. Why is this a recurring aspect in your work?
I was born in a very rural world, and I was also working class. There was a small town next to where I lived. My father worked in a factory and on the farm next door. I’ve always felt a great tenderness towards this world.
My first loves were older men from the cinema. It was William Holden and Cary Grant. When it came to women, I had crushes like Ursula Andress. That world was immediately linked to sensuality and then to sexuality. I like older men, comfortable men, big, cheap men. But it also has to do with politics. We have to resist the idea that sensuality, sexuality, and homosexuality would only concern young people who live in big urban centers, in Paris or New York, and who are well-off, and who make a good living. Because, in the end, it also happens elsewhere. I tend to think that homosexual desire is what connects me to this world.
Speaking of desire, it’s often mixed with violence in your films. Particularly, I think of the scene where Vincent and Jérémie are fighting in the forest. It’s a bit erotic.
I have the impression that films showed fights because we couldn’t film people making love. Scenes of fights and sex scenes are very similar. It’s choreographed in the same way, I think. I work on them a little bit in the same way: there’s still a choreographic element to it. I make the link between the two because I feel like it’s there that we find something animalistic, something primal. It’s where we let ourselves go, whether it’s violence or love or sex. In a film like mine, when there’s two men fighting, that’s what we’re thinking about.
A large part of your work is less realistic and more fabulistic. Why is that interesting to you?
I started making short films in the 90s, and I grew up with a French cinema that was very realistic, very naturalistic, trying to reproduce life as it is, with young filmmakers who made films as their life unfolded. It’s really the tradition of Pialat, Truffaut. This isn’t something I’m interested in.
American cinema was very important to me: I’m more influenced by American cinema than French cinema. Globally, directors like Pedro Almodóvar were very important to me. It’s the extreme, high-color side, trying to do something else with life, while relying on the real. I’ve always been attracted to these filmmakers: David Lynch is a great reference for me. It’s people who mix dreams and reality.
When I was a teenager, one of my great revelations was Luis Bunũel for his surrealism. Reproducing life as it is—I was never interested in that. Bunũel was a filmmaker trying to reinvent the real. I like this idea: I’ve always lived in a world where we struggle with the idea of the real.
I found myself arriving at impasses, socially or politically, in the 70s. The world closed in on me, and I think that fabulistic cinema has allowed me to overcome that. The fable also allows me to universalize problems I find very niche.
The priest’s speech on the cliffside is particularly striking. Could you talk a little bit about this moment?
The idea was to shake up morality. Why should a murderer feel remorse when others are killing so many people in Gaza or Lebanon, for instance? It’s an exchange between a killer and a priest, one who tries to push the Christian precepts to their extreme. That is, he has a great understanding of Jérémie, and exhibits great forgiveness when he says, “There is someone who was murdered. The act was done, and nothing will fix it. Why should life stop?” He brings up great moral questions, great moral precepts, but the priest is ultimately still a man. He struggles primarily to fulfill his desire: he wants to keep the man he loves with him.
Is there a reason you decided he would be a priest?
It comes back to the idea of the fable. It gives a sense of atemporality. The reason I like to go to the countryside too, or in a village like this, is because it’s very hard to place the exact era. I’m very interested in a setting that’s not necessarily very temporally precise.
And the priest is a figure that’s important to me. I was baptized, I did communion, I did everything until I was 12 years old. I was pretty religious. I liked to go to mass. I was quite captivated by the world of religion, but I stopped because I am an atheist now. But I have always been connected to this world. I’m good in churches. I’m connected too, to art, to the rise and fall of religion. I’ve actually been going back to mass recently because I wanted to see how it was changing.
I’ve talked about the fable, but there is also an element of tragedy, the Greek tragedy, the dramatic art, which interests me enormously. I went to the Greek tragedy because I was looking for another mythology than the Christian mythology, but in the end, I came back to it. It’s my own mythology, it’s our own cultural mythology.
Besides, I think I put a lot of myself in the priest. He’s my favorite character in the movie.
Catherine Frot plays Martine in this film. Could you talk a bit about the process of how she came to play this role?
I had a great desire to work with Catherine Frot, but I was scared of one thing: as she’s very well known, I was afraid that we would see Catherine Frot first, rather than Martine. Because Catherine Frot is a very important actress in France, I couldn’t send her the script immediately. If she reads the script, and if she says yes, I can’t say, “No, I’ll do it with someone else.” So I really took the time to think, and I sent her the script, I think she liked it, I think it intrigued her.
An aspect of Misericordia that interested me was the relationship between Martine and the main character Jérémie. There’s an interesting dynamic where he’s gay, but people around them think they’re in love. The film even ends with them (literally) sleeping together.
I think it relates to the kind of fantasies I had as a teenager, like many teenagers, of being in love with your friend’s mother or father. There’s also this aspect of the Greek tragedy, like in Oedipus. I like mixing all these concepts.
I think that where the film becomes very twisted, is that, on the one hand, we don’t know if Jérémie’s a serial killer, or if he’s just a poor guy who’s had a bad day. But he’s still cold-hearted. He doesn’t really get along with people well, but he doesn’t get along with them poorly either. So there’s this question: what will he do to Martine? Is there a desire for Martine? For me, it’s not very clear, neither from her nor from him. He’s gradually replacing her son and her husband. I think she’s also moving on a bit, depending on your reading.
Above all, I think she knows he’s done it. She accepts Jérémie in her bed, but I think she knows. Everyone knows that Jérémie killed Vincent. Everyone tries not to think about it too much. But yes, everyone knows and understands.
In the screening I saw of the film, there was a lot of laughter. Do you expect the audience to find it as funny as they did? I think there’s something with the American audience, in particular, where they want to laugh.
Yes, I found it to laugh a lot. I laughed the whole time. I have the impression that there is something that works in the film between the erotic tension, the suspense, and the laughter, which works like the ingredients of a soup. But I am sometimes surprised by audiences who laughed a lot, and who laughed in other places where I thought, “Yes, you can laugh, but it’s not that funny.” Maybe the American public, as you say, really likes laughing. Maybe they want to laugh, and that’s it. It’s complicated to get people to stop laughing. I could tell them, “No, don’t laugh anymore,” but it wouldn’t work.
You’re an author and director. How do you choose whether to transform a story into a book or a film?
Generally, I start with a novel. When I manage to find my style and my form in the novel, it stays a novel. Otherwise, it becomes a film. For this film, I took a few characters from one of my novels and I made a film out of it, but it’s not a direct adaptation, though there are some similar situations.
I have the impression that the choice comes from frustration, too. The novel lets me do what I can’t in film, but film allows me to go deeper into something rather particular. What’s good about cinema is that it becomes something transformative, because there are actors who play characters. I feel like cinema is more precise. And what I fundamentally like about cinema, because I can’t do this as a novelist, is working with people. That’s a great part of it.
Misericordia plays in NYC until 4/7. Tickets for the film can be purchased here.