Under wraps or busting out all over, inconvenient yearning is everywhere in the films of Alain Guiraudie. And like most of his characters, the French writer-director likes to keep his options open. No one genre suits him.
Now at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, “Misericordia” begins with a homecoming, proceeds to a funeral, expands to other corners of a not-so-sweet-little-village, throws in a murder and a cover-up, and concludes with elements of a deadpan sex comedy. It’s easier to get at what “Misericordia” isn’t than what it is. And that makes it all the more interesting.
The story begins with Jérémie, around age 30 with an uncertain future, falling back into his past. He returns to his former village of Saint-Martial for the funeral of the town baker. Jérémie worked as his apprentice a decade earlier. At the cozy hillside home of Martine, the baker’s widow, Jérémie settles in for a stay of undetermined length. Early on, we see one framed photo in particular that catches Jérémie’s eye: the baker in his prime, in a Speedo, at the beach. Casually, Martine refers to an intimate connection between her late husband and his apprentice.
Connections like that maintain the film’s low boil of erotic intrigue. Martine’s hot-tempered son, Vincent, a childhood frenemy of Jérémie’s, lives nearby. He does not relish the upcoming funeral’s conspicuous outsider worming his way back into Saint-Martial. Vincent and Jérémie, it’s implied, were more than just frenemies when they were teenagers.
The bad blood between them eggs the men onto violence, tinged with physical need. Elsewhere, “Misericordia” lets a comically glaring moment of side-eye do what words cannot. Most of it comes from the town abbot who, in frequent scenes set in the nearby woods, always seems to be drifting into view with his basket of precious mushrooms, whenever Jérémie is near.
The rhythm and plotting of “Misericordia” subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte. Guiraudie’s best-known work, the 2013 movie “Stranger by the Lake,” blended a more selective array of genre elements more smoothly; his new film, nuttier, more free-ranging, sets its queer male gaze inside genre boundaries drawn and re-drawn on the fly. More than once, this or that villager sneaks into Jérémie’s bedroom at night, with something urgent to say. It’s as if a murder story changed its mind and turned into a Joe Orton farce, taken at a peculiar half-speed. Some will buy it, some will not. But if life can pull switcheroos on us, movies can, too.
The cast finesses the material without a misstep as the pent-up townsfolk orbit around cryptic, magnetic Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl. Portraying Martine, whose jealousy-tinged affection for her houseguest becomes genuinely touching, Catherine Frot is the X-factor that makes “Misericordia” a whole, rather than merely parts looking for a whole. As the village abbot never far from the woods, or from Martine’s little dining room table, Jacques Develay manages the trick of utter simplicity in his motives and line readings. Nobody in this village can quite figure out why the alluring tabula rasa, Jérémie, has a hold on everybody. They only know desire works in mysterious ways.
Misleadingly, this filmmaker’s brand of suspense has often been labeled “Hitchcockian,” because there are sometimes corpses to be hidden and alibis to be faked. In “Misericordia,” on the other hand, there’s a touch of Hitchcock’s atypical lark “The Trouble With Harry” in its straight-faced handling of strange developments. The trouble with Jérémie isn’t that he’s dead, even though his homecoming involves not one but two casualties. Is he bad? Misunderstood? A tender soul in hiding? A portrait in opaque omnisexuality, as adaptable as a zipper?
Since “Misericordia” has no interest in being only one kind of movie, it seems strange to expect a single motive or simple explanation from anyone in it.
“Misericordia” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (nudity, some language and violence)
How to watch: Now playing at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. In French with English subtitles.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
