French Oscar Shortlister ‘Misericordia’ From ‘Stranger by the Lake’ Director Alain Guiraudie Threads Death and Desire in Psychosexual Thriller
Maverick director Alain Guiraudie rarely makes concessions.
Through offbeat titles like 2013’s “Stranger by the Lake,” 2016’s “Staying Vertical” and 2022’s “Nobody’s Hero,” the French filmmaker has explored death and desire with an unflinching eye, offsetting social bemusement with an awe for nature. His work is defiant, queer, and idiosyncratic, which makes a recent bout of institutional support all the more surprising – especially to the auteur himself.
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After launching out of Cannes, Guiraudie’s latest film “‘Misericordia” then hit a fall festival grand slam, playing in Telluride, Toronto and New York before making the shortlist for France’s International Feature. Time will tell whether the newly revamped committee goes with Guiraudie’s psychosexual thriller over Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s “The Count of Monte Cristo” or Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,” but whatever the case, the novelist and filmmaker follows his own metric for success.
“You never know what’s going to work, or how your film will be received,” he tells Variety. “So I take the most satisfaction when my films, born of intimate experiences in the villages of Aveyron [a rugged a rural department of Southern France], simply connect with audiences all over. Because that’s really the goal: We’re all trying to universalize our own little world.”
“Misericordia,” like much of Guiraudie’s prior work, casts the rhythms and textures of a rustic, working-class setting through a gently transgressive lens, tracing a spiral of murder, deception and omnisexual lust set off when a young man returns to his native village for a funeral. And as in all of Guiraudie’s work,
the darkly comic film plays deadpan and absurd.
“I might be a realistic person, but not a realistic filmmaker,” he says. “I’m not so interested in ‘representing.’ Instead, I’d rather transform and reinvent to depict a world that better suits my own desires. By embracing an improbable and often dreamlike nature, you can even discover something all the more true.”
The filmmaker did just that with his 2001 short “That Old Dream That Moves,” drawing critical acclaim and industry attention for a film that imagined gay sexuality as an elemental and unquestioned force in a downwardly mobile working-class community. Recognizing harsh economic conditions while situating them within a kind of queer utopia, the film was both slice of life and piece of cake, and while presaging the themes of desire, Guiraudie would continue to explore once he started on features.
“[Desire] is both a mystery and the main driver of life,” he says. “ It’s the one thing that wakes us up in the morning. [So] exploring the intimate is part of a natural artistic process – and filmmakers are not exempt,” he says. “We all try to build bridges between our inner lives and the wider word, while the full intimate interior of the human being seems like one of our last worlds to explore.”
The subject is also intensely malleable, helping the filmmaker overlay sex and death in manners both allusive and explicit.
“Death is in many ways unrepresentable,” says Guiraudie, who sees the subject as the ultimate in big screen fakery. “A dead man on a bed is never a [real cadaver], a death onscreen can never evoke a direct personal experience and [a director] can never kill someone for real to make a film – unless you’re making a snuff movie. But you can play with desire, you can play with love, and you can mime the sexual act.”
The filmmaker stripped the subject bare with 2013’s “Stranger by the Lake,” which mixed libidinal and lethal as it followed a man who knowingly – and excitedly — cruises with a killer.
“That’s still [my most impactful film],” says Guiraudie. “While the subject is very particular and precise, and probably doesn’t reflect the experiences of 99.9% of the population, the film has not become niche. Maybe it’s opened up to something else, to something a little more universal, to a discourse that’s not strictly homosexual, but rather about desire and death, things that concern everyone.”
Of course, the filmmaker doesn’t want to overstate that impact.
“First of all, this was still about naked guys for an hour and a half,” he laughs. “So didn’t bet big on Saturday afternoon admissions. That’s why I’d call it more of a critical success. People still ask me about it, and will for a long time to come, so there’s a real aura; it really made an impression.”
And though Guiraudie would never describe himself as a commercial director, he thinks that market forces will quickly catch to his more personal vision.
“We live in a world that’s increasingly individualistic, increasingly self-centred, where the individual takes precedence over the collective,” he says. “I wonder if this question of intimacy isn’t going to be even more co-opted by mainstream cinema. Artists have new areas to explore, and the same goes for the market.
“I don’t know if [mainstream cinema] will last long with just Marvel,” he continues. “There’s a lot of remaking and over-exploitation of sequels and prequels. So I think the market also needs to find other sources of spectacle. Eroticism is one of them.”
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