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Baffling and Beautiful, Misericordia Is the Strangest of French Thrillers
Beloved in France, Alain Guiraudie’s fascinating new film is a confounding genre hybrid about sublimated (and not so sublimated) desires.
Misericordia was a major critical hit in France, where it was nominated for mountains of awards and was named the best film of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma. He and cinematographer Claire Mathon ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Spencer) give this landscape, with its rough roads and forest canopies and dramatic cliffs, both lyrical beauty and eerie portent: Immersed in nature and removed from society, everybody’s been reduced to their base desires. As our protagonist’s increasing desperation reaches comic proportions, we begin to realize that all along we’ve been watching a film about how to continue living in a world where our actions constantly cause misery, uncertainty, and pain.
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