They've been few and far between, but those films by the French writer-director Alain Guiraudie that have crossed the Channel have been worth going out of one's way to see: I retain fond memories of the 2003 reverie No Rest for the Brave, and the filmmaker enjoyed a notable arthouse hit with 2013's cruising ground murder-mystery Stranger by the Lake. An idea of beneficent deviation sits at the heart of this filmography: Guiraudie's latest Misericordia opens with a shot from the perspective of a car traversing a long and winding road through the countryside, carrying its driver to a reunion that flies off-track at a thoroughly disarming tangent. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) comes this way from Toulouse for the funeral of his beloved late employer, a baker, and soon finds himself in the company of folks he doesn't really know all that well: the deceased's wife (Catherine Frot), their bullet-headed son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who regards this interloper as some kind of threat, and former associates who barely seem to remember Jérémie being there. Such social occasions are, as we know all too well, a potential minefield, and Misericordia initially busies itself laying out the various routes our protagonist might choose to take from here. While Jérémie weighs up whether or not to stick around and reopen the bakery, his healthiest option is going out in the surrounding fields - gorgeously shot by Claire Mathon in vibrant autumnal shades - to pick porcini mushrooms, the perfect accompaniment for a sustaining omelette repast. The path he heads down, however, is one in which he sows psychosexual chaos among his hosts, gets shot at by an irate neighbour, and eventually winds up becoming a murderer. It is, as they say, a funny turn of events.
Again, though, you will likely be struck by the quiet mastery of Guiraudie's storytelling. In some respects, Misericordia is but an exercise in yarnspinning, taking a narrative line for an especially convoluted walk, but there aren't two scenes you'd conventionally put together, nothing appears premeditated, and nothing quite leads where we anticipate it to lead. The result is one of those films where we critics have to tread carefully, to give you a sense of the territory passed through without giving you a full itinerary: far better to watch the road open up before you. Know that you will take this tour alongside a tight knot of exceptionally well cast performers. Kysyl presents as boyish, but he's boyish in the same way Matt Damon's Ripley was boyish, riven by sexual confusion that comes to feel like another secret he feels he has to keep. (Those phallic mushrooms are both as arrows, and as the arrows that pierced St. Sebastian's flanks.) As if to further underline Guiraudie's overarching thesis about the unruly nature of desire, the initial object of Jérémie's misplaced affections isn't some chiselled hunk, but a bluff, gruff agricultural type (David Ayala) - hitherto straight, of course - who appears a stranger to the hairbrush and more commonly resembles a sack of potatoes. You feel the film openly flirt with danger if not disaster upon depicting Jérémie's growing intimacy with the town's veteran priest (Jacques Develay): here's the kind of digression that would once have sparked outrage from more devout quarters, but which Guiraudie approaches as entirely natural and born of sincere compassion, the heart forever being a more dependable guide than the dick.
It is, however, typical of the delight Guiraudie takes in fostering connections between characters that in no other context (and no other cinema) would connect so, and of how the usual rules no longer apply in an Alain Guiraudie film. Instead, Jérémie's long tamped-down, newly eruptive bisexuality threatens to render the entire movie unstable. A confession box scene is shot in such a consciously recto-verso way as to suggest the priest is the one making the confession. An idle fantasy serves as a watertight alibi, then becomes a reality. The police's inquiries into the murder victim's disappearance merges with the guilt-ridden Jérémie's night terrors, such that we might start to wonder how much of what we see is real, and how much simply passing through our hero's deeply troubled head. Without a single computer effect, and with an uncommon affection for the confused souls who pass before his gaze, Guiraudie has created his own world, one with no restrictions, no boundaries and no damning judgement. Stranger by the Lake, which did likewise, possibly crossed over in large part because it was working within a familiar genre template: it remained graspable as a whodunnit, even though we were a long way from the country house. Misericordia is more wilful and auteurist - it has something of Alain Resnais' Wild Grass in its DNA, if that title means anything to you - but it's no less pleasurable and unpredictable, and a real tonic for anyone who'd feared the cinema had long since lost the elements of mystery, grace and surprise. Sometimes it pays to wander off the beaten track.
Misericordia opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.
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