We’ve had more than our fair share of riffs on Pasolini’s “Teorema” as of late, from Bruce LaBruce’s explicit and unwatchable remake this year to Emerald Fennell’s Tik Tok-ified (and unwatchable) retooling from the year before. Some more directly indebted to Pasolini’s transgressive blueprint than others, these reinterpretations all share an affinity for a strangely (sometimes inexplicably) alluring central figure who seduces his way into a small, elite circle. But everybody knows that the French can never be excluded in a game of horny wits, so “Misericordia” has entered the fray with its own particular spin on the material—one that, in practice, is far more intriguing (and chaste?) than any of those other desperate plays at shock value.
Where most films taking inspiration from “Teorema” (and, to a lesser extent, “The Talented Mr. Ripley”) bring the subject into an unattainable class that they can only infiltrate from below the belt, Alain Guiraudie posits a situation in which his central figure is instead someone well acquainted with the targets of his affections, making his way into a milieu far more likely to be familiar to any wandering viewer. It’s in this distinctly quaint approach that “Misericordia” finds its broadly painted but distinctly colorful sense of dry humor.
Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to his hometown—a cozy little village seemingly only home to the handful of players who will become directly relevant to the incoming drama—to attend the funeral of his former boss, the local baker. Precisely how close Jérémie was to his boss is only insinuated (albeit rather strongly), but it’s certainly enough to have him welcomed into the home of the boss’s widow Martine (Catherine Frot), whose own affections for the returning apprentice seem to verge somewhere between innocently motherly and oedipally motherly.
This, as you can imagine, goes over rather poorly with Martine’s son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who takes to Jérémie’s arrival with bullish passive-aggression and a propensity for “innocent” wrestling in the woods. After one of these wrestling matches goes awry, Jérémie finds himself scrambling to dispose of Vincent’s dead body, and the incoming investigation into the man’s disappearance sets off a series of mounting lies and crossed affections that will eat away at Jérémie just as much as they might get him off.
You might assume from this description that “Misericordia” takes on the form of a sort of erotic thriller, but Guiraudie’s tone is far more akin to that of a snug comedy of manners. Making its way through the typical groove of rushed alibis and witness negotiations, the film manages to maintain a relaxed atmosphere that derives the majority of its humor from the nonchalance of everyone’s increasingly forward interactions.
This isn’t to suggest that “Misericordia” takes on a Yorgos Lanthimos-adjacent view of its characters and their line deliveries, but rather that the coziness of Guiraudie’s autumnal setting lays the groundwork for a series of conversations and stolen glances that would suggest that pretty much everyone involved here knows exactly what’s going on, or that they’re too exasperated to care without definitive proof. The concern these supporting players have for Vincent’s well-being is palpable enough, but the way they pop in and out of a scene, or react with casual annoyance to Jérémie’s flimsy alibis—or find themselves adding onto them—gives Guiraudie ample room to find every isolated chuckle in an awkward silence or a side-eyed glance between sips of pastis.
Kysyl, for his part, is quite capable of selling Jérémie’s particular quick-wittedness and subsequent discomfort with where his stacking excuses take his conscience. Each gulp and widening of the eye adds credence to his search for credibility in throwing his scent off the murder, while the places that credibility takes him among these other players leave us wondering just how much of this push under the covers is planned at all.
“Misericordia,” in layering its arid comedic banter so closely to its small troupe, does find itself operating in a rather simple register for laughs belied by the supposed complexity of Jérémie’s attractions—much of the film’s laughs and tensions tend to arise from how funny it is that Jérémie might want to bone a specific, unexpected character, or vice versa. Simplicity, however, doesn’t necessarily mean predictability, and while Alain Guiraudie doesn’t take “Misericordia” to any jaw-droppingly revelatory places narratively, the quality of the individual gags gets increasingly more entertaining with each passing lie. The funniest part, though, is the eventual realization that Jérémie hasn’t slept with anyone at all; sometimes, it’s all about the chase, and this chase is less of the flirtatious variety than that of the (casual) wild goose.
