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‘Misericordia’ Review: Alain Guiraudie’s Darkly Comic Backwoods Fable of Pansexual Desire and Small-Town Sociopathy
A man visits his childhood village for the funeral of a family friend, upending the lives of the local eccentrics in Alain Guiraudie's "Misericordia."
Add into the mix a local priest, Father Philippe (Jacques Develay), an avid mushroom-forager whose earthly passions are enflamed to a very unpriestly degree by the new returnee, and you have a heaving, mulchy mass of sexual possibility for Jérémie to navigate. A grubby little murder occurs in the forest nearby, complicated by the rather wonderful detail that much-sought-after morels apparently thrive on soil nourished by decomposing human remains and will pop up overnight in the shape of the shallow-buried victim. Abetted by a brilliantly cast set of oddballs, from Vincent with his 1950s prizefighter frame to the unkempt Walter with his dirty undershirt straining across his belly to Martine with her air of elegant sexual worldliness to Father Philippe who hides his excitement beneath his cassock, there hasn’t been a more exaggeratedly eccentric vision of French provincialism since Bruno Dumont established his “Li’l Quinquin” universe.
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