In the queer thriller “Misericordia,” coming home is anything but melodramatic

To shoot his new thriller “Misericordia,” Alain Guiraudie went to the only place in the world capable of dredging up an all-consuming, metaphysical melancholy just by crossing the city limits: home. The film is set in the French director’s native region of Occitanie, during the rainy autumn season when fresh mushrooms crop up almost as frequently as secrets. It’s there, in the sleepy town of Saint-Martial, where the lascivious Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) violently collides with his past when he returns home to attend the funeral of his former employer. Jérémie’s presence immediately upends Saint-Martial’s sluggish pace. He is a virus entering a perfect, unchanging ecosystem, slowly working his way through the village until his influence has devoured every remaining shred of stasis. Suddenly, Saint-Martial is alive — but vitality comes at a lethal cost.

Guiraudie — who is openly gay and has been making queer-centric films for decades — innately understands how awkward it is to return to the place you grew up. Coming home is strange enough as it is. But it’s a particularly delicate experience for queer people, who often spend a fair share of their childhood and adolescence conforming to the rigid norms of their surroundings. But Guiraudie has never exactly been interested in working within the confines of reality. His films slant toward the surreal, hooking viewers with their forward-thinking attitudes toward sex and sexuality. Guiraudie celebrates the frivolity of a steamy glance or a leering gaze, and “Misericordia” is no different, which is precisely why it’s such an exciting venture in the realm of contemporary queer filmmaking. The film diverts expectations at every turn, shirking the burdens of the sob story you might see in a typical gay homecoming film. Here, nobody gives a second thought to the fact that Jérémie is queer. His appearance even encourages introspection among the townspeople. Maybe they’ve all got a little sugar hidden in their tank. 

But “Misericordia” is in no rush to answer that question. Guiraudie avoids urgency at all costs, letting his characters meander through the woods and have entire conversations that have nothing to do with Jérémie’s sexuality at all. His queerness is a welcome afterthought, divergent from a spate of gay homecoming films that hinge their narratives on a character’s struggle to come out or be themselves around their family. While that unease remains a familiar reality for queer people, Guiraudie’s film imagines a not-too-distant world where queerness is folded into the fabric of everyday life. “Misericordia” subverts the long-held idea that gay coming-home movies equate to weepy melodramas. Its farcical mystery challenges the stagnancy of gay narratives in contemporary cinema, twisting a common trope into something fresh and sensual for our modern world.

Yet, initially, Saint-Martial looks anything but modern. When Jérémie arrives, his car winds through narrow roads and past centuries-old brick buildings. Nary a person is outside. To a stranger’s eye, the village looks almost abandoned. As it turns out, its residents feel similarly. They’ve lost Jean-Pierre, the town’s baker, whose bread kept people lining up weekly, giving them a reason to rise each Sunday. Jérémie’s homecoming is a comfort for Jean-Pierre’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), who invites Jérémie to stay with her as long as he likes after the funeral. Martine sets him up in the childhood bedroom of Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), her son and Jérémie’s best friend, which remains just as Jérémie remembers it.

Félix Kysyl and Catherine Frot in “Misericordia” (Courtesy of CG Films/Losange Production)

Guiraudie cleverly sprinkles these suggestions of what transpired before Jérémie left Saint-Martial throughout the film, tucked neatly into casual references to the past. Vincent has been married since he and Jérémie last saw one another, moving out of his mother’s house and leaving a free room for his old pal. But when the two see each other again, all these years later, the energy between them is charged. Their light jokes turn into physical shoving and wrestling. A masculine hedonism sits between them, but Guiraudie is reticent to confirm the nature of their relationship. One moment, the two men look like they’re play-fighting. The next, their gasps and grunts turn carnal, almost violent. 

Vincent eventually gets the idea that Jérémie wants to have sex with Martine, and that he’s staying in Saint-Martial after the funeral to seduce her. A strange Freudian complex wedges itself between Jérémie, Vincent and Martine. The thought of Jérémie sleeping in his bed, close to his mother, enrages Vincent, who brings Jérémie into the woods to fight in the privacy of the tall trees and their blinding fall foliage. This altercation is devoid of the playful eroticism their relationship once had. In a flash, Jérémie picks up a rock and splatters his friend’s blood all over the nearby porcini, stuck out of the wet earth like fungal voyeurs. 

Here, Guiraudie takes an even harder pivot from the typical gay homecoming story but gets closer to the truth than any other recent film tackling the same subject. Over the last five years, writers and directors have attempted to shift the coming out story into the coming home story. Films like “All of Us Strangers,” “Happiest Season” and “Of an Age” have attempted to depict the stomach-twisting anxiety of being queer and finding yourself smack dab in the place you tried so hard to get out of, and to varying success. These movies frequently become mired in their own good intentions, diluting their messaging to something as plain and palatable as, say, “Love, Simon.” 

In Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers,” the main character, Adam (Andrew Scott), travels to his childhood home outside London, where he finds his dead mother and father waiting for him. At first, this feels like an unusual and exciting way for Haigh to explore the motions of coming out and coming home. But the film eventually turns maudlin, going so far as to include a prolonged scene where Adam says goodbye to the memory of his parents in a restaurant they used to frequent as a family. It’s sweet and even a little cathartic. But it still feels like the character is eternally tied to his sexuality and all of the suffering it brought him in his formative years. It’s a film that gestures to how messy and uncomfortable it is to be queer in your hometown, but has little to say about why that discomfort occurs in the first place.

“Misericordia” (Courtesy of CG Cinema/Losange Production)

Being queer and coming home is a strange thing. Some of us spend the first 18-ish years of our lives waiting until the day we can leave, headed toward someplace where we can feel free to be more like ourselves. Establishing that freedom is one thing, but contending with it when you arrive back in your childhood home is another entirely. Being newly autonomous in a place where you once felt you had no control is an eerie thing. The power goes straight to your head, an intoxicating rush that splits desire from better judgment. The first few Christmases I returned to my hometown, I felt all-powerful and completely helpless, grappling with the memory of how things used to be while overindulging in bad decisions to make up for lost time. How strange it feels for your sexuality to finally be a mere footnote of your life, only to return to the place where every day was spent wishing it could all be so simple.

Guiraudie makes that fantasy a reality in “Misericordia,” making queerness into something so routine it’s almost dull — but without denying that coming home is inherently chaotic. When the police come sniffing around trying to find the missing Vincent, Jérémie decides his best bet is to seduce virtually all of Saint-Martial, just like his dead best friend thought he’d do. Jérémie drinks to excess and hits on townspeople but can’t successfully throw the cops off his trail. That is, until Saint-Martial’s priest, Philippe (Jacques Develay), who admires Jérémie’s tall, slim frame and sculptural beauty, takes a liking to Jérémie. The two men walk in the forest among the rich oranges and yellows that adorn the branches around them. Under the cover of an autumn afternoon, Jérémie and Philippe hatch an absurd plan to give Jérémie an alibi: The two men were in bed together on the night of Vincent’s disappearance. 

Their defense means the two will have to enter into some form of close bond long enough for the police to stop suspecting Jérémie. In a small village like Saint-Martial, it could take years for the alibi to stick. When Jérémie debates turning himself in instead, Philippe tells him, “Imprisonment is worse than death.” For a moment, Guiraudie ponders whether staying in Saint-Martial would be a fate equivalent to imprisonment for Jérémie. Would being inextricably tied to Philippe not trap him in his hometown forever? 

But Philippe senses Jérémie’s hesitation and offers a bit of comfort. The priest assures his paramour that he does not require love in return for Jérémie’s freedom, only the occasional stroll through the woods or conversation. “I could love him without noise for eternity,” Philippe says, looking toward a hypothetical future with Jérémie. As crushing as coming home can be, it can produce these virtuous, alluring thoughts. This is what we’re capable of thinking when straddling two worlds: the one we exist in now as adults and the one we grew up in. With one foot in either place, we’re pulled between the impish naivete of childhood — when the future seemed vast and bright — and the doldrums of adulthood. 

In another film, this tug of war between past and present might produce an overly sentimental final act, where the main character comes to terms with the former life that’s haunted him since he arrived home. But in “Misericordia,” things are never so predictable. Guiraudie considers Jérémie’s future without using his sexuality as a deciding factor to point the character toward a definite future. His fate is opaque and, therefore, far more realistic. He’s caught in the mess he’s made for himself, and it’s one so dire that it can’t be helped by any sniveling revelations about how his queerness has impacted his trip to Saint-Martial. In Guiraudie’s film, queerness is neither the problem nor the solution. It is simply a facet of Jérémie’s existence, one that will help him forge a path forward, through woods dotted with mushrooms — new life born from rot and decay.