Writer-director Alain Guiraudie must surely now be said to match Quentin Dupieux for the weirdest sense of humour in French cinema. But is comedy exactly what is happening here? Because this has to be one of the strangest films of the year – or the most deadpan of deadpan in-jokes. At one point, I thought I saw the performer playing a police officer almost laugh, but perhaps every single actor here was on the verge of cracking up throughout the shoot. It could be that every time Guiraudie yelled “Cut” everyone burst out laughing.
You could also call Misericordia queer cinema, with the word “queer” also working in its non-sexual sense. Guiraudie made his international breakthrough with his 2013 film Stranger By the Lake, but it’s now clear that the seriousness and vehemence of that psychosexual drama are atypical of the director’s real instincts, which are towards waywardness and playfulness and unreadable, inscrutable mischief. And here, as sometimes in the past, he looks as if he is making it up as he goes along.
