Film review

  • Misericordia

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Miséricorde

    Alain Guiraudie (2024)

    I hadn’t seen an Alain Guiraudie film since Stranger by the Lake (2013) and nearly didn’t see this one.  I booked a show at Curzon Bloomsbury on Misericordia’s closing day there, arrived to find the screening cancelled because of technical issues, jumped on a tube to Green Park and managed to see the film at Curzon Mayfair instead.  I only wish the effort had been more rewarding.  Although critically well received, Misericordia is an increasingly unsatisfying psychological thriller until the point at which it’s clear that Guiraudie (who also wrote the screenplay) is aiming for jet-black comedy rather than mystery or suspense.  After that, Misericordia is still unsatisfying but dislikeably self-satisfied, too.

    Thirtyish Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) travels from his home in Toulouse to Saint-Martial, the village in the Ardèche département where he grew up, to attend the funeral of Jean-Pierre, the village baker who was once Jérémie’s boss.  After supper with Jean-Pierre’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), and her son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), whom Jérémie knew years back, he’s all set to drive back to Toulouse.  Martine says it’s late and a long journey; she suggests Jérémie stay the night; he gratefully accepts her invitation.  Come the next morning, he has decided he’ll hang around for longer.  Martine is happy for him to be her guest, staying in what used to be Vincent’s room.  She even suggests that Jérémie re-open and run the bakery, which closed during her husband’s final illness; Jérémie declines the offer, although it emerges that he’s currently unemployed.  Vincent, now married and with a young son, is less than thrilled by Jérémie’s reappearance.  In the days that follow, the pair have three fights in woodland above Saint-Martial.  The first one isn’t much more than horseplay.  The second is more aggressive.  The third is deadly serious:  Jérémie kills Vincent and buries his body in the woods.

    According to a website called Mindtrip, Saint-Martial is ‘Known for its scenic beauty and tranquil environment, … a small village that offers a glimpse into traditional French rural life’.  Although the landscape in Misericordia isn’t as remarkably distinctive as the setting for Stranger by the Lake, it has dramatic potential.  The images created by Claire Mathon (DP on the earlier film also – and on Guiraudie’s next one, Staying Vertical (2016)) not only capture the ‘scenic beauty’ but also suggest a ‘tranquil environment’ about to be disturbed.  Guiraudie could be said to be satirising ‘traditional French rural life’ – to the extent that nearly all the characters’ relationships are sexualised, mostly homosexualised.  But unless you’re prepared to see Misericordia as surrealistic (and think that’s another word for nonsensical), the film doesn’t add up.

    The narrative is soon dropping heavy hints about Jérémie’s sexual orientation.  He bumps into Walter (David Ayala), a reclusive older local, and mentions this to Vincent, who recalls that Jérémie used to resent Vincent’s spending time with Walter because ‘you wanted him to yourself’.  (It’s a bit confusing, incidentally, that Vincent, though clearly a generation younger than Walter, looks a good few years older than Jérémie.)  Jérémie now pursues this old acquaintance, trying unsuccessfully, on a visit to Walter’s place, to seduce him.  The first sylvan scrap with Vincent seems to have a homoerotic edge to it, underlined by the look that Jérémie and Vincent get from the local priest, Philippe Griseul (Jacques Develay), whose sudden appearance – he’s foraging for mushrooms in the woods – interrupts their roughhousing.  Over the course of the film, the priest, first seen conducting Vincent’s father’s funeral, is repeatedly back in the woods for more mushrooms or sitting at Martine’s kitchen table.  In due course, the look he gives Jérémie and Vincent on that first encounter will take on a different meaning.  The elderly priest is gay, too, and wants Jérémie – enough, eventually, to give him a false alibi in relation to Vincent’s disappearance.  Philippe tells the local gendarmerie that Jérémie was with him throughout the night that Vincent failed to return home; when officers call at the presbytery subsequently, they find Philippe and Jérémie in bed together.

    None of this animates Saint-Martial as a comically unexpected hotbed of forbidden desires, though, because the people on the screen tend not to react much.  The only exceptions are Vincent and, briefly, Walter, when Jérémie tries it on with him.  Early on, Martine shows Jérémie a family photo album; he asks if she still has the negatives because he’d like a photograph to remember Jean-Pierre by.  When she asks which one he’d like, Jérémie promptly points to a photo of Jean-Pierre in a pair of speedos; Martine simply asks if he’s still in love with her husband and Jérémie confirms that he is.  You might have thought Jérémie left Saint-Martial for Toulouse because gay life would be easier in a big city but he needn’t have bothered:  no one bats an eyelid in the village.  In the closing stages, the priest isn’t worried about revealing to police either his sexuality or even, when they invade the presbytery, his naked body:  he merely gets out of the bed he’s sharing with Jérémie; marches, cock erect, to the bedroom door; and tells his visitors to get lost, which they do.

    It’s not just sex that people in Misericordia don’t get worked up about.  Martine doesn’t grieve much for her husband or seem worried when her son disappears – ditto Vincent’s wife Annie (Tatiana Spivakova).  Guiraudie presumably has the couple’s young son Kilian (Elio Lunetta), to whom Vincent is apparently devoted, vanish from the film along with his father in case Kilian gets upset and complicates things.  Jérémie’s killing of Vincent isn’t planned but nor is it presented as a rush of blood to the head.  (The same can’t be said, alas, for poor Vincent’s head after Jérémie bashes it with a rock:  the camera dwells on the bloody result for what seems ages.)   Jérémie does have a nightmare or two afterwards and even contemplates suicide, but not for long:  for the most part he’s affectless.  The local gendarmes (Sébastien Faglain and Salomé Lopes) seem less incompetent than indifferent to solving the mystery of Vincent’s disappearance and who’s responsible for it.  One of Vincent’s last acts is to appear at dead of night in his ex-bedroom and accuse Jérémie of wanting sex with his mother.  Jérémie dismisses the accusation as ridiculous and so it increasingly seems until the film’s closing scene.  Jérémie asks if he can snuggle up to Martine in her bed and she agrees.  When he starts to embrace her, she says it’s a bit soon for that but OK for them to hold hands.

    In Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie took the playing-with-fire possibilities of cruising for gay sex and really ran with them:  the struggle between the main character’s desire for and fear of a man he knew to be a murderer – desire always getting the better of the struggle – sustained the film to the very end.   Misericordia’s shocks aren’t nearly so dramatically focused.  Even the title’s a bit vague.  It’s not clear how mercy or compassion comes into the story – maybe Guiraudie just means to signal the Catholic element of what’s in store.  The best scene and the worst scene in the film both feature Jérémie and the priest.  The latter bustles Jérémie into the church confessional and insists the younger man hear rather than make a confession:  the priest then confesses that he knows Vincent has been murdered and by whom – that he has sinned, and will continue to sin, in not making that knowledge more widely known.  This sacrilegious role reversal provides the film with a rare injection of funny-peculiar tension and surprise.  Misericordia‘s feeblest moment comes when the priest dissuades Jérémie from taking his own life, assuring him he needn’t feel especially guilty about his crime since the world is going to pot and we’re all guilty.   Jérémie does point out in response that there’s a difference between failing to save the planet and proactively ending a human life.  He nonetheless retreats from the cliff edge.  His only motive for doing so, as it was for staying more than a single night in Saint-Martial in the first place, is that Alain Guiraudie needs Jérémie to stick around.

    3 April 2025

  • Winter Kept Us Warm

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Secter (1965)

    It was fascinating to watch Lloyd-Eyre Morgan and Neil Ely’s Departures, then David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm, at BFI Flare – two films made sixty years apart, screened just a few hours apart.  I was drawn to Secter’s because of its Eliotian title and, once I’d read the brochure blurb, by its antiquity.  The characters are students at the University of Toronto and Winter Kept Us Warm was shot, in black and white, on location there.  The timeframe extends from late 1964 to early 1965 (the winter during which T S Eliot died, coincidentally); same-sex sexual activity in Canada for consenting adults in private wasn’t decriminalised until 1969.  This means – as Flare programmer Zorian Clayton, introducing the screening in NFT1, explained – that Secter’s film is extensively ‘coded’.  That may be an understatement.  Winter Kept Us Warm is thoroughly opaque – but that opacity adds to its historical interest.  It also has an amusing aspect.  David Secter was in his very early twenties, and still a Toronto student himself, when he made the film, on a $750 grant obtained from the University’s students’ union.  He advertised for cast members in the student newspaper:  several of those who ended up in the cast were unaware the story had gay overtones.

    Even though Winter Kept Us Warm has recently been restored, it takes a while, watching it now, to adjust to the lack of technical sophistication, especially the sound quality.  The writing – Secter shared the screenplay credit with Ian Porter and John Clute – is far from primitive, though.  The main characters are two students, Peter Saarinen (Henry Tarvainen) and Doug Harris (John Labow), apparently chalk and cheese.  Peter is a shy, unconfident freshman, reading philosophy and English; Doug is a popular, gregarious senior student, reading economics.  An introductory sequence cuts between their road journeys to the halls of residence – Peter in the back of a taxi with plenty of luggage, Doug driving his own car and travelling light.  Secter uses different pieces of music to accompany these journeys – a thin, almost plaintive melody for Peter, a jazzier arrangement for Doug.  Peter, whose ancestry is Finnish, lives somewhere in rural Canada and, in his first few weeks as a student, receives a regular supply of parcels from his mother – extra blankets, Finnish pastry.  Doug’s background is metropolitan; in one scene, he meets up with his parents in Toronto.  He also has a regular girlfriend, Bev (Joy Tepperman).  One of Winter Keeps Us Warm’s strongest elements is how Secter defies the expectations encouraged by the initial impression given of his protagonists.  The stage seems set for shy, somehow feminine Peter to fall in love – unrequited love – with handsome, self-assured Doug.  Something like the reverse happens but another of the film’s strengths, thanks in part perhaps to its persistently muffled quality, is that it’s not quite as simple as that.

    To earn some pocket money, Peter signs up, as other freshmen do, to wait on tables in the student refectory.  Doing his first session there, he finds Doug the most volubly derisive of a group of senior students; soon afterwards, Doug realises that he’s upset Peter and that upsets Doug, too.  It’s from this point that their friendship starts to develop but with Doug usually taking the conversational lead and Peter seeming to welcome Doug’s protection, not least in social settings.  Doug’s other friends, including Bev, seem amused that he bothers spending time with awkward, diffident Peter.  It’s after the turn of the calendar year that the ground starts to shift.  Peter auditions for a part in a student production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and, to his and Doug’s surprise, gets the part of Oswald.  As he grows in confidence during rehearsals, Peter also gets friendlier with Sandra (Janet Amos), who plays Mrs Alving and is much more experienced than Peter, both as a student actor and socially.  As Peter spends more time with Sandra, tensions grow between him and Doug, whom Bev finds increasingly distracted and remote.  Puzzled by what’s happening, she says to him at one point, ‘Honestly, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think that you and Peter …‘  Doug reacts angrily and Bev says no more, which makes the exchange all the more tantalising.  It’s worth noting that David Secter, regardless of his priorities in making Winter Kept Us Warm, treats Bev just as sympathetically as he treats Doug and Peter.

    The film’s climax takes place on an evening that Peter spends with Sandra, and that Doug spends with Bev.  As in the opening sequence, Secter cuts to and fro between his two principals, eventually in bedrooms.  The sex there is filmed as discreetly as any implicitly gay interactions in the story but it’s clear that Doug and Bev’s sleeping together is desultory and unsatisfying, and Peter’s night with Sandra quite the opposite.  Peter’s still euphoric when he tells Doug the next day that he’s lost his virginity.  One of Peter’s set texts is The Waste Land, in which, early in the film, Doug shows little interest.  In the closing scene, he returns to the library, takes The Waste Land from the shelves and starts to read from ‘The Burial of the Dead’.

    A middle-aged hall porter (Sol Mandlsohn), welcoming Peter to the student residence at the start, tells him he’s in ‘Lowrey house … there’s lots of mighty fine fellows in Lowrey’.  A later sequence showing students in the showers ends abruptly as Doug is soaping Peter’s back.  Both moments got a big laugh in NFT1 from the pre-alerted audience though I wasn’t sure that either qualified as coded.  The audience reacted to the shower sequence as if Secter had cut away just when something homoerotic was about to happen but there’s nothing in subsequent scenes to suggest that Peter and Doug have shared physical intimacy of a romantic kind, let alone had sex together.  Winter Kept Us Warm is confounding because it’s governed by three aspects of contemporary taboo in relation to same-sex relationships which, as you watch the film, are virtually impossible to disentwine – what the film censor wouldn’t pass, what the law of the land didn’t allow, and what feelings young people were constrained from expressing or even admitting to themselves.

    This last aspect is enriched by Secter’s successfully conveying that the Toronto students, smart but still unsure of themselves, are to an extent putting on an act whatever their sexual feelings.  At the same time, the non-professional cast perhaps adds to the film’s confusing nature.  It wouldn’t be fair to describe these student actors as amateurish but of course they’re short on professional training and discipline.  As Peter, Henry Tarvainen hits some effective notes but isn’t emotionally precise – a few times, he seems to play a scene as he feels it rather than according to what would make better sense in relation to the story’s development.  John Labow’s portrait of Doug is more coherent and focused, though also limited because the script virtually ignores (or deliberately obfuscates) whether Doug struggled with homosexual feelings before Peter came along.  All four main players in Winter Kept Us Warm went on to substantial creative careers in Canada:  Henry Tarvainen as a theatre director; John Labow as a television producer; Janet Amos as an actress in film, TV and theatre, and a theatre director; Joy Tepperman (now Fielding) as a novelist.

    29 March 2025

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