New York Film Festival 2024:
Law of Desire:
An Interview with Alain Guiraudie (Misericordia)
By Leonardo Goi
Few directors working today have proven as perceptive in depicting human desire as Alain Guiraudie. Fewer still have conveyed its effects as vividly. In pursuing and living out their urges, the French filmmaker’s many lonely drifters do not just release their pent-up lust, they unlock something about themselves that changes the way they see the world and their own place inside it. Adapted from Guiraudie’s 2021 novel Rabalaïre, Misericordia similarly treats desire as a liberating force. No one fucks this time—a stark departure from the director’s more overtly graphic features like his 2013 Stranger by the Lake—yet everyone yearns, if only in starkly different ways. There’s Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a thirty-something baker who returns to Saint-Martial—a remote village in the department of Aveyron, in southern France—for the funeral of his former boss, whom he may or may not have been romantically involved with. There’s the departed’s wife, Martine (Catherine Frot), who welcomes back Jérémie as a prodigal son. And then there’s Father Grisolles (Jacques Develay), a local priest who grows smitten with the young man and helps him escape justice after a brawl with Martine’s son goes horribly wrong.
By turns comic and sinister, Misericordia unfurls as a pastoral thriller, dogging Jérémie as he tries to cover his tracks, all while wrestling with his carnal longings and those of his unlikely accomplice. It’s not the fact that no one gets to fulfill those urges that sets the film apart from Guiraudie’s previous work. It’s that desire is explored in its myriad shapes: lust, passion, filial love, and the love of the title, Latin for mercy. There is something so authentic about that depiction, as well as Guiraudie’s efforts to illustrate how no one is immune to such longings, spiritual or carnal. Filmed by Claire Mathon—now in her third collaboration with the director following Stranger by the Lake and 2016’s Staying Vertical—Misericordia traffics in deep-focus long shots that turn the woods around Saint Martial into a seductive, oneiric universe: a "phantasmic milieu,” in his words.
I sat down with the director earlier this year in Cannes to discuss the role desire plays in his latest, his collaboration with Claire Mathon, and the importance of sex scenes across his cinema. Misericordia makes its U.S. premiere this week at the New York Film Festival.
Reverse Shot: I was looking at the map on my way over and it looks as though the village where Misericordia is set isn’t too far from where you grew up.
Alain Guiraudie: Oh yeah, not far at all, 150 kilometers, give or take. It’s the same department, Aveyron; most importantly, it’s the same style of village and countryside I grew up in.
RS: It’s not the first film you’ve set in this region. What keeps drawing you back?
AG: It’s a world I know very well. This is where I was born, where I was raised. The whole small village life—with its isolated farms, its everyday rituals, like the way people meet and drink together, how someone will show up for a glass at yours and next thing you know you’ll have three, four other guests, just because everyone always wants to join. It’s a lifestyle I’m very accustomed to and feel like I can talk about with a certain degree of legitimacy. But there’s also another dimension. A village like the one we found for the film, surrounded by woods… there’s something almost atemporal about it, wouldn’t you say? Take away the cars and it looks like we could be in the seventies. You don’t get that in a city, with its breakneck rhythms. And I suspect I’m very attached to the place because I like to think of a village as kind of a fairy-tale world.
RS: Do you have these places in mind before you start writing? I’m curious as to what comes first—the script or the location.
AG: It depends. Stranger by the Lake, for instance, we shot far away from this region, 600 km or so. But I did have another, much closer lake in mind as I was writing, a very precise location; if we didn’t end up shooting there it was just because we received a grant to shoot in the south of France instead—not too far from Cannes, incidentally. But yeah, I usually think of the setting first. Take Staying Vertical: the film sprang out of a place in southern France I loved dearly at the time—and still do, for the record. Nobody’s Hero was born in Clermont Ferrand… Yet in Misericordia, the place came after. I mean, of course I had some kind of locale in mind, but it wasn’t real. I guess I was aiming for a cross between my childhood village and a more phantasmic milieu.
RS: One thing I really love about your way of capturing these settings is that landscapes never function as inert backgrounds; there’s always a strong synergy between them and your characters.
AG: I’d rather speak about that relationship in terms of places rather than landscapes or decor. I don’t know whether that changes things in any way. But yeah, from the minute I start writing, places are supremely important to me… [pauses] Come to think of it though, maybe that’s also because when you film on 35mm you can play with the depth of field, and I love when you get to see very far.
RS: Could you speak about your collaboration with Claire Mathon? Did you storyboard first and then show her what you had in mind, shot by shot?
AG: Not quite, but I did write a découpage for her. That’s not storyboarding, exactly. I used to draw little sketches in the past, but now I don’t anymore. Still, I do jot down some notes with dramatic and visual cues for each shot, and then sit with Laurent [Lunetta], the art director, and Claire [Mathon], and we work on that together. They bring their ideas, I share mine, and then we’ll take a final look in the early morning, on set, just before we start shooting. It’s funny because Claire and I don’t like to lock things in stone like that. That’s the problem with storyboards, I think; once you have everything sketched out then things tend to be a little too fixed. I mean, I have worked with storyboards before—which were really just some poor drawings I did—but that never prevented me from changing things. All in all, we try to prepare as much as we can, as precisely as possible.
RS: You’ve said that Stranger by the Lake began with the image of a young man drowning. Was there a specific one that set Misericordia in motion?
AG: Mmm. [long pause] I don’t think so, no. I was going to say the scene at the confessional, or maybe the fight, early on, but that wouldn’t be right. I think the whole story really just started the way it does in the novel, with Jérémie showing up at the village for the funeral. Other than that, I relied on stories from my adolescence, and on the ghosts of my adolescence, too. You should know that my adolescence has lasted quite some time—45 years, to be exact! [laughs]
RS: Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is also not the first time that you have turned one of your own novels into a film. Could you tell me how that transition played out in Misericordia?
AG: Well, it was only after the novel was published and translated that I thought I might borrow a few characters… But I see the film more like a variation on the novel. I wanted to develop the text further, and in different ways. I guess I really wanted to give it a new body, so to speak, and work with real actors to make something different out of it. Book and film behave very differently; in the novel, I kept adding more and more material. The book is huge—a 1000-page tome!—and all sorts of things happen in it; there are many more characters and storylines than the ones featured in Misericordia. But what I love about the film, and turning the book into one, is that I can subtract and remove lots of things along the way—while writing the script, for one, but also in the prep work I do before the shoot, and then in the editing room, naturally.
RS: So how much does the final film differ from what was originally in the script?
AG: Lots! After all, the script doesn’t tell you which actors will star in the film, doesn’t give you the exact locations of the shoot—I had one in mind for Misericordia, but it wasn’t where we ended up filming. And there were several sequences in the screenplay that we wound up cutting in the editing. There’s a lot less dialogue than what I had originally written. I was stunned by all we took out in the end. People have told me Misericordia is a lot more taciturn than my standards—certainly a lot less garrulous than your average French film.
RS: Would you agree?
AG: I’m not sure. I feel like the film is saying a lot, to tell you the truth. But there’s certainly a different rhythm to the words here compared to my previous projects. This is largely a function of Jérémie’s predicament; after all, the guy must keep on fabricating new stories for the cops, so he must think carefully about what he’s going to say, and how. And those who listen to his version of the events also need their time to process his words. Should they trust him? Should they not? It’s fascinating to me just how prominent a role silence plays in the film.
RS: One thing that hasn’t changed much is your interest in desire, a key motif in your cinema. But Misericordia seems to complicate matters slightly, because desire here takes many different shapes: there’s lust, love, family bonds, religious devotion, different ways of caring for and thirsting over each other…
AG: I really like how you put it. It’s true; the intention here was to make an erotic film without relying on or showing sexual acts. That was something I told myself from the very beginning: no one will make love this time.
RS: Why?
AG: Because I think if desire is not consummated that way, it can last a lot longer. But I like your reading. I think that it was this restraint that allowed us to better explore the mystery of desire and all its different forms.
RS: Yet sex scenes in your films are never mere digressions or hollow spectacles; they all help to expand your characters and unfurl your narratives.
AG: I always thought it was important for me to make those scenes because, well, sex is cinema’s great ellipsis. And sex scenes are often so poorly crafted—a few unimaginative shots, and then the obligatory jump cuts to spice things up a bit. But it’s crucial, when you go about working on one, to truly build your sex scenes, and make sure that they last. I mean, obviously we’re all different, but it’s quite frankly rare for sex to be over in ten seconds or so! [laughs] And it’s important to give these scenes a sense of continuity, too—without slicing them through jump cuts or ellipses. Through the years, this became for me both an aesthetic and political pursuit. But sex scenes have also always been essential to my narratives, as you pointed out. I like to treat them the way I treat a dialogue scene; there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or a fight scene. I don’t see why one should choreograph a brawl but not a sex scene. Sex is an essential part of every romance; you can still love without consummating your desire that way, but it’s nonetheless an inescapable facet of our lives.
RS: There’s something so egalitarian about your films and how people pursue and consummate their passions in them. Conventionally attractive or not, all your characters get to follow their urges, whatever those may be.
AG: That’s because everyone has a right to their sexuality and to live their desires to the fullest. And that became a political project for me in the sense that the poor, the workers, the old—all those people seemed to have vanished completely from erotic depictions in cinema. They were completely excluded from sensuality and sexuality—not to mention homosexuality. Back in the 1980s, the impression that was being peddled was that every homosexual was young, hot, toned, and most importantly, urban. Gays all lived in big cities; I wanted to push back against that narrative and suggest that desire thrived elsewhere, too.
RS: Is this why you’ve often cast people who defy traditional ideas of beauty?
AG: Yes. As in, I look for people with a physicality that says something about them, people who can speak through their physique, if that makes sense. Their bodies aside, I think I’m also drawn to these people’s ways of being. After all, one’s physique is an integral part of one’s personality.
RS: What about Félix Kysyl then? You spoke about Saint-Martial’s atemporal aura, and I think there’s something about your lead that speaks to that; his childlike face suggests someone “suspended” in time, not a teen but not quite a fully formed adult either. What made you think he’d be perfect for the role?
AG: This is all fairly intimate, you know. I mean, obviously I already knew Félix was a good actor, and he does indeed possess this ambiguity you’re mentioning—he can come across as angelic or devilish at once. He’s the kind of person who could receive the communion wafer without going through confession first. An altar boy and a serial killer; I think he could play both just as well. But isn’t the whole casting process powered by desire and seduction, when you think about it? That’s what I meant by “intimate”; after all, I usually end up casting people I like and want to spend time with. Or not. There were times when I worked with people I really did not want to be around, but you have to find an asshole to play a villain, so.
RS: Still, egalitarian as your films may be, they’re often marred by very graphic acts of violence. Misericordia is no different. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the role violence plays here and in your other films.
AG: I’ve always liked linking sex with fights; there’s not much sex in Misericordia, but brawls abound… Or, to be more precise, there are lots of hand-to-hand confrontations. Working on these scenes with our stuntman, the idea was always to make sure the actors would be as close to each other as possible, and that the fights themselves would be realistic. Our guiding principle was simplicity. The fight between Jérémie and Vincent, the throwing of the stone—I wanted these to be as straightforward and simple as possible. As for the relationship between desire and death, that’s as old as time itself; it’s the connection eros-thanatos, the cornerstone of my films.