Forget “be gay, do crimes.” The latest moviegoing French import says “be gay, do sins.”
Coming from provocateur Alain Guiraudie, Misericordia is a must-see comedic thriller that skewers small town life and features a scene destined to give viewers equal shock and button-pushing delight.
In Misericordia, Félix Kysyl stars as Jérémie, a gay man who returns to his childhood village for the funeral of the town baker, his former boss. Reunited with the baker’s family–including the baker’s son Vincent, who Jérémie shared sexual experiences with–Jérémie decides to lay low in the town longer than intended. Jérémie’s mere presence stirs all kinds of tension among this small circle, with more than a few secret sexual urges in the mix. All this leads to the coverup of a violent crime where Jérémie’s only confidant is the local priest.
As previously noted by The Daily Beast Obsessed’s Nick Schager, “Misericordia proves a novel spin on a familiar formula, its strange psychosexual undercurrents lending it a decidedly Hitchcockian mania.” But also peppered throughout Misericordia’s nuances is an audacious and hilariously casual willingness to shock. Suffice it to say: much as it draws on films like Rope and Psycho, this ain’t your parents’ Hitchcock homage!
Misericordia’s, um, biggest provocation comes late in the film and it demands discussion, so spoilers ahead…
So, about that priest. Even though it seems everyone in his hometown is at least a little bit hot for Jérémie, no one is more so than the town priest. Played with comic morbidity by Jacques Develay, this lust culminates in a third act fully nude scene where Develay’s visible and voluminous erection comes to Jérémie’s defense. Misericordia serves us an onscreen gay priest b---r. It’s a moment (and film, really) to make the likes of John Waters proud.
Guiraudie is a director proven to be unafraid of taboo or provocation. His films regularly feature bracingly frank depictions of sex, graphic nudity, and darker themes undercut with devilish wit. The most familiar to American audiences is his cult erotic thriller Stranger by the Lake, which centers on a young man who frequents a countryside cruising spot and falls for a potential serial killer. That film earned a reputation for its unsimulated sex scenes and near constant nudity, but still resonates for how Guiraudie captures eroticism tinged with terror and compulsion.
Now, it isn’t just this explicit moment where Misericordia finds joy in pushing envelopes, especially regarding gay sexuality. One scene in particular will draw hoots from underwear enthusiasts and daddy chasers alike. Misericordia is one to see with a crowd, or maybe just your most misanthropic gay friend.
Guiraudie’s perspective on sex is playful and winking, even in the film’s darkest passages. The forest that serves as Jérémie’s cruising ground is also the priest’s favored spot for mushroom hunting–now there’s a new gay euphemism for you. The film’s tagline–“some confessions come with a body count”–is itself a double entendre: with some sexual tension present between Jérémie and just about every character that comes in his orbit, exactly how many of them has he had sex with, or might he?
Misericordia’s sensibility is itself subversive. The kinkiness that runs through Misericordia all underscores its central plot of a gay man returning to his traditional hometown. To Guiraudie, those are deeply straight and straightlaced places where sexual secrecy and violent aggression hide in plain sight, ever ready to spring to life. Queer lust is inherently dangerous in that environment, but all that straight society seriousness can be very silly.
Jérémie also does bad things (and Kysyl’s terrific performance smartly keeps Jérémie morally inscrutable), but from Guiraudie’s queer vantage point, the social norms of clear right and wrong become murky. The film floats its most subversive idea through Develay: indifference to punishment for a crime occurring in a world so full of suffering that it renders that one crime insignificant. How much violence has been happening in that very community and with much worse consequences?
And Guiraudie’s subverting of those norms becomes deeply fun, particularly when presenting Develay in his altogether. Onscreen erections have been seen before, even on Netflix where Gaspar Noe’s Love spawned TikTok reaction videos and Blonde drew ire. And explicit sex continues to be a taboo filmmakers attempt to break.
Guiraudie goes there but does so with intention. The onscreen erection isn’t just a pearl-clutching sight gag, but it’s confronting several taboos at once–gay sex, religious norms, what we are and aren’t allowed to depict onscreen, and from what type of bodies, to name a few–and makes mockery of each one. It’s a b---r, but Guiraudie makes it a highly contextualized b---r.
