THE film Misericordia (Cert. 12A) begins inside a car journeying through the south of France. The camera pans to reveal the driver, Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl), en route to the village of Saint-Martial, his birthplace. He has come home after many years for the funeral of Jean-Pierre Rigal, the local baker for whom he worked. This return of the native, like Thomas Hardy’s novel, provides a mixture of repressed feelings, sexual intrigue, and the struggle between natural forces and social conventions. These themes get primarily expressed via two abiding motifs: bread and time.
At the graveside, the parish priest, the Abbé Philippe Griseul (Jacques Develay) tells mourners that Jean-Pierre had devoted his life to giving them bread. The ceremony serves as a prelude to what is in effect a meditation on what gives life in all its fullness. Jérémie accepts the invitation from Martine (Catherine Frot), Rigal’s widow, to stay a while in what in effect is her House of Bread, the Hebrew for which is Bethlehem. Are we to regard this bakery as a potential place for new birth?
Martine herself cuts something of a Madonna figure, forever breathing fresh life into moribund souls. Jérémie is a case in point, hungering (did he but know it) for the bread that he discarded in moving away. His daily quest constitutes searching in the woods for the elusive porcini mushrooms that are also known as penny buns. By way of contrast, Philippe, whom he regularly meets there, fills basket with them. It put me in mind that one translation of the Lord’s Prayer includes the words “The bread of tomorrow [i.e. heaven], give us today.” Philippe seems to know where to find such spiritual nourishment. It is something that the director Alain Guiraudie’s other characters yearn for.
Martine’s hot-tempered son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) resents Jérémie’s return. He barges into his erstwhile friend’s bedroom at unearthly hours of the night. These are salient moments when attention is drawn to time as registered on the alarm clock, which we frequently see. It is repeatedly a point of illumination on an otherwise dark screen. As such, it symbolises two different understandings of time. There is chronos, which stolidly records minute after minute of Jérémie’s restless life. There is also kairos: those ethereal moments that hint at eternity.
For Guiraudie, these are to be found in times when misericordia (mercy and compassion) prevails. A striking example of this is Philippe’s bundling Jérémie into the confession box at church, saying “You can be my priest”. (After all, his surname happens to be Pastor.) Philippe reveals that he knows a murderer, but doesn’t think informing the authorities would serve the divine purpose. Realising that his attitude runs contrary to Catholicism’s normative ethics, he nevertheless presents a theological defence of how God’s everlasting mercy exceeds the casuistic tendencies of fallible, chronos-obsessed humanity.
The film won the Prix Louis-Delluc prize for Best French Film of 2024. Using the structure of an absurdist thriller spiced with gallows humour, the director sets before us a challenge akin to Deuteronomy 30.15: life and prosperity or death and destruction?
