A man visits his childhood village to attend the funeral of a family friend and upends the lives of the local eccentrics in this strange, earthy return to form from the French director.
Marking a welcome return to the simplified murderous perversities of his fantastical “Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie gives the Cannes Premiere section one of his brightest and darkest films with the eerily offbeat “Mercy.” In the director’s best work, Guiraudie’s trademark is infusing genre dalliances with acerbic wit and a delightfully quirky, challenging weirdness. And while it may seem straightforward at first (and thankfully avoids the madcap tone shifts of the murky tragicomedy “Staying Vertical” (2016) and the rather baffling terrorist sex farce “Nobody’s Hero” (2022)), no one could accuse this increasingly twisted psychodrama of being self-serious.
Director: Alain Guiraudie
Writer: Alain Guiraudie
Stars: Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand
From the start, there is something odd. The prologue is a driving sequence, shot from the point of view of the unseen driver, through the narrow country roads of mountainous south-west France. Nothing overtly strange happens – even the landscape is banal, shot in hazy earth tones by Claire Mathon’s intelligent, unromantic camera. But something about the absolute silence of the driver (no drones, no car radio) and this stretch of Marc Verdaguer’s vaguely sinister soundtrack is reminiscent of a later Hitchcock scene, played with the cold precision of Claude Chabrol. There seems to be malice here, or at least a strange absence of kindness.
The impression dissipates by the end of the journey, however. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a polite young man with a childlike, helpful air, has returned to the small village where he spent his adolescence, to attend the funeral of Jean-Pierre, the baker he used to work for. Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), Jean-Pierre's son, greets him with suspicion, but Martine (Catherine Frot), Vincent's mother and the new widow, welcomes him with more warmth. She insists, despite Jérémie's apparent reluctance to intrude, that he stay with her in the house above the bakery, in the bedroom that used to be Vincent's before he married and started his own family.
The roots of Vincent's animosity soon become apparent: he suspects Jérémie of making advances to his still-attractive mother. Meanwhile, Martine believes Jérémie had actually been in love with her late husband. But then the first person Jérémie openly makes advances to is Walter (David Ayala), Vincent's best friend, a portly, pastis-loving loner who lives alone in his family's old house and seems to take pride in not working or interacting much with the world. The relationship between Vincent and Jérémie is also underpinned by a homoeroticism that sizzles in their wrestling matches and Vincent’s habit of appearing at dawn to haunt Jérémie’s bed. Add to the mix a local priest, Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), an avid mushroom picker whose earthly passions are inflamed to a very unpriestly degree by the recent returnee, and you have a mass of sexual possibilities for Jérémie to explore. Who will he seduce or be seduced by? Why not all of them, “Theorem” style?
A dirty little murder occurs in the nearby woods, complicated by the wonderful detail that the much sought-after morels apparently thrive in soil nourished by decaying human remains and will appear overnight in the form of the shallowly buried victim. Or perhaps it is simply a fantasy of the guilty, like a fungal version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” another red herring designed to slowly unravel our own preconceptions about guilt, innocence and boorishness in this strange town.
Aided by a brilliant cast of eccentric characters, from Vincent with his 1950s boxer frame to scruffy Walter with his dirty T-shirt pulling at his belly, Martine with her air of elegant sexual worldliness and Father Philippe hiding his arousal under his cassock, there has not been a more exaggeratedly eccentric vision of French provincialism since Bruno Dumont established his universe of “Petit Quinquin.”
And so our natural sympathies are redirected again and again as the comparatively attractive and telegenic Jérémie becomes Guiraudie’s equivalent of an unreliable narrator. We finally realize, amid the absurd gags about sexuality and sardonic attacks on religious hypocrisy, that “Mercy” doesn’t follow a fish trying to swim in unfamiliar waters, or even a strange cat let loose among the local pigeons. Instead, it’s a parable.
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