Returning to Saint-Martial for his late boss's funeral, Jérémie's stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions.
EN
“I’m fond of quoting Michel Schneider: ‘All novels are stories in which we tell ourselves what we are, what we would like to be, and what we don’t know we are.’ The same goes for films.”
Alain Guiraudie1
“And so our natural sympathies are redirected and redirected again as the comparatively engaging and telegenic Jérémie becomes the Guiraudie equivalent of an unreliable narrator.”
Jessica Kiang2
“The longer Jérémie stays in the village, the more the relationships among the characters become blurred. Desires of all sorts (love, hate, tenderness, sex) arise, even between unexpected people, and to make things even more complicated, these intimate desires can be unrequited, or clash with the public image one wishes to convey. As always with the filmmaker there is a great deal of intelligence at work here, so as to maintain our connection with the characters in all conditions, and to keep his story running smoothly as it undergoes several tone shifts. One scene will bring to mind Pasolini’s Teorema, with Jérémie as the spark igniting the repressed desires of the townsfolk, and the next will feel like a bedroom farce. All of this leads the film into the place Guiraudie enjoys exploring the most: a grey area of complete amorality, not in the sense of depravity but rather of actions taking place outside the social construct of morality.”
Erwan Desbois3
Céline Bozon: Knowing you, the reference to Sous le soleil de Satan jumped out at me : the confessional, those light loss...
Claire Mathon: I saw Sous le soleil de Satan again, without talking to Alain about it. I remembered it very vividly. I also saw Pola X again, the forest at night, as an American night or in the evening... And L’armée des ombres, for which I’m particularly fond of the nights and their mystery.
So the season was important.
A lot. It’s the end of autumn, the most beautiful moment before there are no more leaves, the peak of color. But it’s such a short moment. In the film, we can almost see the arrival and the end of this flamboyant autumn. The work plan focused on autumn and took the weather into account. [...] I did some tests in September, a month and a half before shooting, on a full moon day in the forest and in the village. It was nice to see that the full moon gave an effect akin to cinema artifice, like a spotlight with its shadows. But the forest is so dense that even with a full moon, we couldn’t register anything - it was pitch black. So I came up with the idea of directionless, soft shadows. The nights in the film are a mixture of day for night in gray weather, sequences shot at the last moment of twilight or at first light at dawn, and real lit night. We also used a full moon and additional light to shoot the very wide shot of Jeremiah on his way to the presbytery. The other way to make the nights seem as dark as possible - and this is a recurring motif in the film, both indoors and out - is to turn the lights on and off. Right from the start, I was looking for that sensation of seeing almost nothing when you’ve just turned off the light. It’s a figure I’ve tried to develop by playing with this effect linked to our perception.”
Céline Bozon and Hélène de Roux in conversation with Claire Mathon4
- 1Alain Guiraudie, quoted in the Miséricorde press kit.
- 2Jessica Kiang, “‘Misericordia’ Review: Alain Guiraudie’s Darkly Comic Backwoods Fable of Pansexual Desire and Small-Town Sociopathy”, Variety, 27 May 2024.
- 3Erwan Desbois, “Cannes 2024 review: Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie),” International Cinephile Society, 20 May 2024.
- 4Céline Bozon and Hélène de Roux, “Claire Mathon, AFC, looks back at her choices in shooting Alain Guiraudie’s ‘Miséricorde’”, Contre-Champ AFC, nr. 356 (2024).