Misericordia First Draft

Incomplete first draft for Taipei Mansions: "My Nights at Martine's"

Among the arthouse filmmakers who had what appeared to be a breakthrough hit in the early to mid-2010s, only to recede in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another, Alain Guiraudie is perhaps the most understandable instance of this somewhat lamentable trend. 2013 was a few years before my time, but Stranger by the Lake still remains one of the more surprising near across-the-board critical hits of the past fifteen years or so; with the possible exception of Valeska Grisebach's Western, there's almost no other recent, rigorously directed film from a largely unheralded director to match its level of appreciation. Certain factors melded together to help buoy its profile, functioning simultaneously as a slow-burn thriller, a treatise on gay sexuality, a bulging compendium of casual nudity, and even a quasi-hangout film (in multiple senses of the word). It's thus not terribly hard to see why Guiraudie's follow-ups Staying Vertical (2016) and Nobody's Hero (2021)—trending towards overt surrealism and knotty political commentary respectively—failed to catch fire, even given their more modest but still evident merits.

It's too early as of this writing to say whether Misericordia represents a full-fledged critical resurgence for Guiraudie. (Cannes didn't seem to think so, shunting it into the Cannes Première sidebar, a decision about as widely criticized as the placement of the considerably more legendary Víctor Erice's Close Your Eyes the previous year.) Whether it does or not seems ultimately even more irrelevant than usual when faced with its manifold pleasures and elaborations upon Guiraudie's ever-present interest in the haziness of desires, queer or otherwise, and in the fundamental strangeness of community. Like Stranger by the Lake, it comes to revolve around a murder, yet Misericordia