There’s a wonderfully frank clifftop scene in Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie’s new rural thriller, in which a priest seems to give absolution to a murderer. Not through some great act of clemency, though, but because of what he wants in return. “He’s a lot like me,” says the director, laughing. “He’s navigating between his greater ideals and his desires as a man. I think a lot of us do that.”
Morally flexible clergymen, vacillating killers, characters whose desires lead them into terra incognita – this is Guiraudie’s morally unstable terrain. Misericordia is the mirror image of his much-praised 2013 psychological drama Stranger By the Lake. Where that film made a murderer a dimly grasped object of desire, here the point of view is the killer’s. Jérémie stirs up dormant passions when he returns to his childhood village for the funeral of his former baker boss. In Guiraudie’s hands, it’s never certain whether a story will turn out tragic or comic. In Misericordia, it’s both: the film starts off in Talented Mr Ripley territory, before spiralling into bed-hopping, gendarme-dodging farce.
I’d hoped to meet Guiraudie in Aveyron, where he was born and where many of his films are set, but he’s upped sticks from the south-west and now lives in Paris. “After 20 years, I fancied a change of horizon,” he says, sitting in a brasserie near the capital’s Buttes-Chaumont park. “And also I was there less and less. My furniture may as well have been in a storage unit.”
With a full head of silvery hair and well-hewn features, the 60-year-old still looks fresh from a hike in the stark Aveyron highlands, in his Polartec jacket, climbing shoes and headband. Through Misericordia, Stranger By the Lake and his 2016 comedy-drama Staying Vertical, he has broadened the scope of on-screen depictions of rural France, something he thinks has narrowed since the 1970s.
Mainly, Guiraudie likes to remind audiences that sexuality is just as rich out there as it is on the Parisian thoroughfare moving past our brasserie window. “The working class has become completely excluded from the representation of sensuality, of sexuality, of homosexuality,” he says. “There’s an impression those things only concern hot young people in sexy jobs. But it’s important to remember you can be a worker, or a farmer, and gay. Or not even gay, but with an erotic life.”
The priest wandering into shot fully erect in Misericordia – surely a screen first – gets that point across effectively, as does the middle-aged sex worker cheerfully plying her trade in 2022’s Nobody’s Hero. It seems natural that Guiraudie is on intimate terms with la France profonde: he grew up in a five-house hamlet north of Toulouse with his parents on a small dairy farm. The claustrophobia of Misericordia – “where everyone is always making up stories about the neighbours” – is a direct lift. In such a place, the idea of making films seemed absurd: “It felt very far off socially and geographically. My parents always had a tendency to dampen my ambitions. By saying, ‘Careful. It’s not possible. You won’t get there.’”
After dropping out of history studies in Montpellier, Guiraudie began writing novels, then realised they were closer to film scripts. He broke out of his inertia by describing it, writing a story about two layabouts in a village square bantering about some magazine project. Encouraged by a Toulouse producer to film it, he turned it into his first short: 1990’s Les Héros Sont Immortels (Heroes Never Die). He learned everything about film-making on the job, while working simultaneously as a night watchman. “It was the most thrilling period of my youth,” he says, “apart from certain great parties.”
The erotic action of Stranger By the Lake was focused on the titular cruising spot, its drama alternating between horny conversations at its nudist beach and pornographically shot tussles in the undergrowth. The film had a classical purity. Although it was rapturously reviewed, and was by far his most commercially successful, some American viewers felt it described a world that had been made obsolete by Grindr and the like. But Guiraudie points out that real-life cruising is far from dead – from Berlin’s Tiergarten to the actual lake where they filmed, Sainte-Croix in south-east France. “It hasn’t completely disappeared,” he says. “Especially in France, we’re still attached to it. We’ve still got that romantic notion of sex and love.”
Even the film’s explicit sex scenes added to the Greco-Roman feel. Shot with body doubles, this was an area in which Guiraudie forced himself to take a head-on approach. “I wanted to face up to the representation of sex and of my sexuality: homosexuality. It’s complicated because you give up a lot of your intimate self and you have to ask a lot of actors.”
For someone whose films are so carnal, Guiraudie is an unlikely sort of moralist, in his amused fascination with how best to negotiate the world. His characters, in their wayward navigation of their desires, seem constantly to be trying to locate the correct path – not that the director, as his films veer from tragic to comic, makes it easy for them. That appears to be Guiraudie’s take on how the universe works: a sense of unfathomability probably inherited from his Catholic education. Until he lost his faith at the age of 14, he insisted on going to mass himself, despite his parents’ indifference to it. He points out that Catholicism has the same kind of pragmatic accommodation to sex seen in his films: “It integrates the physical needs of man quite well. The proof is that forgives easily [via confession].”
Guiraudie has torn up and strewn across the table his Kusmi tea sachet. He’s getting used to Paris, he says, a once-unthinkable notion: “I’m liking it more and more. I’m doing things the opposite way round to everyone else, heading off to the countryside as they get older.”
Currently writing a new film, this Molière of the Massif Central is headed somewhere new in his work too: it will be set in France’s overseas territories. Not that us humans have any choice but to adapt. “My impression is that whatever we’re living through – amorous or otherwise – never lives up to our ideals.” He laughs once more. “Reality always smacks us in the face.”
• Misericordia is out on 28 March
