This morning, autumn, a priest, and mushrooms: three determining motifs of a film released today at the cinema, “Miséricorde”, by Alain Guiraudie, the director of Inconnu du Lac and Rester vertical . A very strange story which takes place in a village in the South of France, a village like a new place in French cinema, anti-picturesque, anti-naturalist, and which allows a fable with a completely indeterminate moral to occur.
It begins with a funeral, that of the baker of this small town, Saint Martial, perched in the Causses du Rouergue. Jérémie, a young man who grew up there and worked with him, came for the occasion, he is attached to this man, to his wife Martine, and also, it seems, to other inhabitants: Vincent the son of the couple, who lives on his own with his wife and children, and Walter, another solitary man, who lives at the end of the village. Jérémie lingers there for a day, then two, then more, talks about perhaps taking over the bakery, walks mostly, and often meets Vincent and Jacques in the neighboring forest, and the village abbot, who picks mushrooms there. , is still, strangely, in its path. He seems to welcome Jérémie’s extended stay rather favorably, but it is more complicated for Vincent, who begins to find suspicious the interest that the newcomer has in his mother and the village.
I had seen the trailer for the film a few weeks ago, and nothing in the images it showed suggested the particular beauty of the film. With its short fragments, showing gendarmes in a sad little kitchen, Catherine Frot and her stunned look, a priest in a cassock in a forest, one could imagine a game of cluedo with a sluggish grotesqueness – a bit of a TV movie, something mediocre in short , a thousand miles from the title. Gold Mercy is a great film, which only resembles itself, a little to Guiraudie’s previous ones and then again, and which subverts all the expectations one can have of a fiction which takes a French village as its setting.
Potting soil
It’s not easy to analyze because there is nothing spectacular in the writing or the direction. It is a film which seems to avoid all attributions to forms and genre. There is indeed a film noir plot in this film which begins and ends in a cemetery, with real effects of suspense and even terror, however always subverted by a frank realism, in the representation of the ultimately banal everyday life. of this handful of characters – with the abandoned bakery, the fear of hearsay, the garish blue tint of Vincent’s car. There is indeed tragedy, in the exacerbation of violence, the uprising of secrets, but constantly counterbalanced by an assumed burlesque. Satire sometimes surfaces in the way of characterizing the characters into types – the baker, the priest, the outcast, but never bites – the film loves them too much – and it seems that everyone can constantly emancipate themselves from their initial position social or sexual. There is a form of grandiloquence, which is also reflected in this title of “mercy”, a word borrowed from Christian vocabulary, but which meets a sobriety of the staging, an almost gray simplicity of the dialogues, without effusion, without affectation none – which makes us wonder throughout: but how does Alain Guiraudie make us feel like we’ve never seen that.
All these contradictions are found deep down in this character, first peripheral then central, of a country priest played by the excellent Jacques Develay, who is as much a part of the tortured heroes of Bernanos via the Pialat cinema as of the buffoonish abbots of Italian comedy. : with his cassock and his basket of mushrooms, his greatness of soul and his pettiness: a unique character of his kind, whose appearances will undoubtedly remain engraved in the memory of spectators.
While the country village, its social hierarchy, its propensity for rumor, are often places of closure for the story, closed game boards which freeze roles and characters, the village of Guiraudie is in constant movement, in germination could – we say. It is a place of a-moral circulation of desires, and this idea of a-morality far tests its possibility in the story; In short, this village is not a land, but a breeding ground.
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