Revue 'Misericordia': French Surprise French thriller

Alain Guiraudie's “Misericordia” wonderfully very sentimental French thriller begins in a mood, the one he never shakes up while events collect in a winding way. A baker died. He lived in the remote town of Saint-Martial, making breads for what seems to be a small number of neighbors. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), at some point an apprentice teenager to this man, but now an adult drifting and face with a harvest of perplexed hair, returned to stand up near his corpse and his grive.

Or perhaps he does not cry as much as thinking, back in the city of her childhood where the widow of the baker, Martine (Catherine Frot), stirred by the presence of Jeremiah, insists that he remains a little in the empty room of her ex-Chum Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), now adult and moved with his own family. There is a backdrop here, salty and suggestive, but Guiraudie also sparingly, while waiting for his plot to get up with fullness. Jérémie may have liked his mentor, his wife too, perhaps more than that. And Vincent is not crazy about his return.

“Misericordia”, both in title and a film, would suggest a dive in mourning or, to pass the Latin translation, something close to compassionate mercy. Disorior, Guiraudie has no interest in making this film. He launches Jérémie on the street as an impenetrable chaos agent in a crumpled denim, tense tense in the woods with Vincent and flirt with Walter (David Ayala), a Lackabout with a solution that does not care to drink in company. Each scene brings another layer to the performance of Kysyl, turns curious, lonely and aggressive turn.

Jeremiah is part where he does not belong – you feel it before you see it. Guiraudie, better known for its 2013 erotic mystery “Foreign by the lake”, Never chopped his images with such chabroline tension as he does here. Filmmaker with a queer orientation, he writes characters who are particularly freed from morality, which makes them dimensional but also dangerous. “Misericordia” is played out in a flow of night surprises (these are bakers with wicked hours), including the repeated view of Vincent hovering on the sleeping domestic smell in his old bed.

None of this takes place from the cellos or the jump treatment of most American thrillers (Marc Verdaguer's score travels a synthetic suggestion rope). Even when there is a murder – it is a real ancestor – Guiraudie continues with his insistent and deliberate flow, a sophisticated touch that makes you love the subversion of the film or will make you aspire to something more melodramatic.

Try to resist this impulse. You will miss the pair of clumsy local cops (Sébastien Faglain and Salomé) who, in an extent of dark comedy, addresses the case in such a manner without haste and without judgment, it looks more like a hobby for them. They too keep hours of a strange midnight, just like a local Berobé priest, Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), whose behavior hides a daring sequence and a penchant to come to the right place at the wrong time.

It is not the kind of puzzle thriller in which all the elements click in place with a beating literature that compliments an attentive eye. It is the one that welcomes the whims of human behavior, leaving the punishment aside as a secondary concern. And like the uniform mushrooms of the community which seem to grow well on shallow and dug graves, there is a feeling of inevitability of the multitude. You can Go home, “Misericordia” suggests, perhaps with more agenda the second time. The guilt of the packaging is optional.