Just when you think that you’ve seen every kind of thriller conceivable by the human species, along comes a movie like Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia” to reinvigorate your senses. Like last year’s “Last Summer,” this movie is a reminder that many thrillers essentially feel the same. They are often moralistic and out to work you over with big and melodramatic moments. By contrast, “Misericordia” has a crisp European sort of neutrality that suggests that all moments outrageous and quiet and comforting are equal alike in the human continuum. Guiraudie effectively says “nothing surprises me.”
The film’s opening gets a Hitchcock groove going. A car descends the hills of a pastoral paradise, the Southern France commune of Saint-Martial. These scenes are shot from the point of view of the driver. As in the many driving scenes of, say, “Vertigo,” we are invited to link ourselves to the protagonist, sinking into a dream. The driver is Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a handsome guy in his 30s or so who has returned to his home community to attend the funeral of a mentor, a respected artisan baker.
Jérémie has been away for 10 years, and the film is driven by the community’s varying reactions to his return. The son of Jérémie’s mentor, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), is a meathead with a short fuse, a former peer of Jérémie’s who resents the speediness with which Jérémie eases into the home of Vincent’s mother, Martine (Catherine Frot). There’s a lot in those last few sentences, and there’s more: We learn that Jérémie was romantically infatuated with his mentor, of which Martine is aware, though this knowledge only intensifies Jérémie and Martine’s own escalating sexual tension.
Vincent’s anger is understandable, and if the film were told from his point of view we would probably be conditioned to see Jérémie as an interloper who feels that he can breeze into town and take whatever he wants. But we are linked to Jérémie, and so we are primed to resent Vincent as a graceless bully who is constantly hectoring our surrogate. Once Jérémie begins staying over at Martine’s, in Vincent’s childhood bedroom no less, Vincent appears every morning at 4 a.m. to torment Jérémie, deriding him for his manipulation of Martine. Vincent also resurfaces constantly in the local woods for fights with Jérémie that suggest foreplay, and the woods become a handy metaphor for everyone’s suppressed erotic longings.
With few settings, a handful of characters and a trim and tart, 104-minute running time, Guiraudie creates a rich and haunting community that is untethered by the return of this man. Their emotions seem to be both parodied and crystallized by Guiraudie’s swift and lucid staging, and by those extraordinary landscape compositions.
Everyone seemingly wants to have sex with Jérémie, who has appetites that appear to evolve in tandem with his survival instincts. His fluidity feels increasingly exploitive of the community, even if Jérémie admits to the local priest (Jacques Develay) that they are not going to happen in the bedroom. The priest’s response is matter of fact and heartbreaking: “I have learned to love without return.”
The vast sexual irresistibility of Jérémie begins as an absurdist joke and grows into a parable with shifting meanings. At its broadest, “Misericordia” is concerned with the many ways that erotic hunger can electrify and destabilize a community, disrupting the facades that people assume. As he also evinced in his equally skillful “Stranger by the Lake,” Guiraudie is unusually democratic about the kinds of human bodies that he’s willing to show nude or in sexual contexts.
The priest, of whom we eventually see quite a bit, is an aging everyday man and looks it.
Another former acquaintance of Jérémie’s, Walter (David Ayala), is large and unkempt, though Guiraudie regards Jérémie trying to sleep with him as simply something that happens. Many people, not only media-saturated hotties, belong to the human comedy of sex. Guiraudie doesn’t condescend to Walter with manufactured pathos, rendering him a dork or a doormat. Walter can be absurd, thoughtful, even menacing. With the exception of Vincent, a useful stereotype, everyone here is accorded the dignity of unpredictability. We never quite know where anyone is coming from. Like real people, these characters have thickets of unresolved and contradictory emotional baggage.
A murder happens, and “Misericordia” becomes a comic nightmare of replacement told from the point of view of the usurper. It’s as if Jérémie’s return is a response to the community’s submerged collective wish to trade the boorish Vincent for a more intelligent and erotically enticing and malleable figure. This idea is never voiced; if it were the movie would be less powerful. But it’s Vincent’s fear of being replaced that escalates his own murder and speeds up Jérémie’s merging with the town.
This wish to be rid of Vincent is but one of the submerged desires here. When Jérémie has to hide a crime, his sense of living a double life becomes a metaphor for the double lives that ordinary people lead to blend in with society. Walter and Vincent may each covet Jérémie sexually, but if they do they do not have the internal resources to acknowledge or satisfy that hunger. The priest does have those resources, and his need to honor himself enables Jérémie to hide a murder. Meanwhile, Martine oscillates between utilizing Jérémie to replace her son and her husband. The reverberations are head-spinning. “Misericordia” contains multitudes, and it’s alive.
Guiraudie leads us into an abyss of guilt and longing with a masterful sense of economy and suggestion, and a sharp sense of humor. The movie is quite funny in a way that’s difficult to explain. When a cop suspects Jérémie for Vincent’s disappearance, he starts to stalk Jérémie in the middle of the night, as Vincent did. Comedy often threatens to take “Misericordia” into a surreal realm, though it never crosses over. Intellectualized jokes and motifs cohabitate with slapstick; and there are contemplations of guilt and morality and love that would be at home in the cinema of Ingmar Bergman.
A lovely surprise, “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is a romantically tinged comedy of regret that comforts you without making you feel as if you’ve been had. It has the feel of a Nick Hornby novel in how it mixes formula with acidity to keep things from getting too cute. And it has the plot of a Hornby novel, linking music to a soul’s state of affairs.
Charles (Tim Key), an eccentric widower living on the titular island, off the coast of Wales, hires a once famous folk duo to play a private set for him on the beach. The duo has long been separated, professionally and romantically, and Charles didn’t tell one of them that this was intended as a reunion show. Chris (Tom Basden) has gone on to larger fame with impersonal music, while Nell (Carey Mulligan) has married and left the business. Director James Griffith and Key and Basden, who wrote the script, tease out these details shrewdly.
The first act is a droll two-hander between Key and Basden, a team in real life who expertly play tennis with one another’s contrasting energies. They keep finding little wrinkles on the broad types they are playing, the nerd and haunted cool dude, respectively. A scene explaining how Charles has money is hilarious, a wonderful joke that turns the contrivance of this set-up into an asset rather than a liability.
Nell enters the picture and complicates the bro rhythms. Charles is not over the loss of his wife, while Chris is inevitably not over the loss of Nell. Once her husband leaves to chase birds, Nell is stuck between a rock and a hard place, or between two sensitive and heartbroken and more than faintly irritating men. The concert that Charles has paid for Nell and Chris to stage is going to be a catharsis for everyone involved.
That sounds like it could be cheesy — “Bridget Jones” on “Gilligan’s Island” perhaps — but the film has an aura of wounded delicacy that is quite enchanting. Like the excellent Hugh Grant movie that was made from Hornby’s “About a Boy,” “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is essentially a chick flick for men, which could’ve left Mulligan stranded in a thankless role. But she’s pivotal to maintaining this movie’s equilibrium, keeping it from collapsing into masculine self-pity. For my money, Mulligan’s never been sharper.
It is, of course, about the guys though, and the filmmakers throw a few curveballs in the last act that allow the self-growth to feel thorny and difficult, or, in other words, earned. This is the kind of intelligent crowd-pleaser that you can watch with mom, the spouse, or that bro who is almost ready to admit that he’s ready to grow up.
“Misericordia” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, while “The Ballad of Wallis Island” can be found on Peacock. Both can be rented as well.
