We can generally trust Alain Guiraudie to organize trouble and sparkle on his set. Casting is one of its levers. In Mercyaround the astonishing Catherine Frot, whom the public knows well, there is a cluster of actors who, as formidable as they are, are not immediately identifiable. In this disconcerting homosexual, mystical and sylvan thriller, Félix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, David Ayala thus play their part in the strangeness. The prize for the bizarre, however, goes to Jacques Develay, who plays an abbot character that we rarely see in the cinema.
Possibly in love with Jérémie, the young man suspected of murder, this character always appears unexpectedly, in the corner of the woods, sometimes to surprise him, sometimes to save the day. A playful deus ex machina, the abbot, a parable of divine protection which has become flesh, ends up putting him in his bed to protect him from the gendarmes. The tandem he forms with the hero thus seems to decouple the angelic visitor from the Theorem (1968), by Pier Paolo Pasolini, incl Mercy would be the rural avatar. The most disturbing thing is that the mystery of this role continues when we meet its interpreter.
A discreet man of keen intelligence, Jacques Develay, 72 years old and a handful of film appearances, is, like his character, a revelation. He speaks admirably of his role: “The abbot understands things before everyone else, he discerns things in Jérémie. This discernment is part of his job, for me. He is also a man who is himself vague about his desire. He is not a good-natured abbot. He carries the word, he has an evangelical, universal love, and a particular love, which is incarnated. The vertical and horizontal dimensions merge with him. »
“Six roles of ecclesiastics”
The knowledge and interest in the Catholic religion which shines through in these words truly refers to the interior garden that Jacques Develay cultivates. Born in Yonne to a civil servant father and a stay-at-home mother “devout and reactionary”this Burgundian receives “an integral Catholic education”. He spent his adolescence at the Collège de France in Paris, where his father was general secretary. Later, as a literature student in Nice, he had an important encounter with a chaplain from the home where he lived, who revealed him to a brighter dimension of faith. The young man found reason to enroll in the major seminary to become a priest. Then gave up, and launched, in the 1980s, a career as an actor and theater director in several companies. He stars Garcia Lorca, Peter Weiss, Fassbinder, Chekhov. In the 1990s, he began an audiovisual career late in life, obtaining secondary roles in series such as The Institute or, more recently, So let them beas well as in the cinema.
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