Alain Guiraudie reassures me. His books, his films, we can do both, and we can tell the same story in both, three times as many times as we want. On condition that we respect reality, that we never seek in the imagination the artifices that laziness claims to impose on the creator. From one work to another, cinematographic or literary, the more we tell the same thing, the more the stories differ and enlighten us by shedding light on the subject. These stories are not only enriched or refined, they are radically different. And yet the real story, what happened, is always there, immanent, elusive. And time doesn’t help things, memory flees.
The hero of Guiraudie’s latest film is not Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl, it is the aura that envelops all of Guiraudie’s characters, literary or cinematographic. A form of love that the author decides to name, at the same time as his film, Mercy.
There is an intrigue, it is very light, fluid, does not seek to be believed, the crime happens without warning, simply, without fear, the corpse is dragged where it should be dragged and buried in a very strange, as if to soon be found. Everything is handmade in this film, right down to the hole dug for the corpse. In all thrillers, you have to bury the corpse, it’s a cinematic “meme”; in this genre, we have never seen such a shallow hole. The corpse is dragged reverently, covered in a thin blanket of autumn leaves. Merciful cover in the sense that its thinness leaves possible and even imminent its discovery and that of the truth about the assassin, who we know, but towards whom Guiraudie’s mercy acts from the start.
There is suspense every time the mushroom pickers pass by the small pile of leaves. The suspense is all the more intense when five or six beautiful morels, as if by chance, have pierced the naive carpet of dead leaves with their phallic hats. The murderer, who always returns to the scene of his crime, picks them up and eats them during a meal shared with the family of the deceased. It’s always an exceptional meal when there are morels. Among the Carthusians, the less frugal meal than usual that the monks allow themselves once a week is called a “mercy”. And for me, it reminded me of the apple that fell on the grass in the little garden of the Neuengamme concentration camp where my grandfather died, an apple that I had picked up and bit into. She had, now I know, a taste for mercy.
The whisper of ideas
What is disturbing, pleasant, exhilarating in Guiraudie’s cinematographic and literary writing is the envelopment of taboos, the whispering of truths. The pleasure of damnations comes or becomes humor, it covers the village like a radioactive cloud which would have spread its jokes, the priest, the gendarme and the gendarmette, the bakery which closed and this exterminating angel who seems to have invented the opposite extermination… disinhibition? Because he has a tenderness for everyone that no one can resist. The act is never brutal, it is made of surprise, and remains in progress.
In the past, when Pasolini called Terence Stamp for his Theorem, beauty, youth and well-honed vice combine to make forgiveness impossible. Ditto when René Clément calls Delon for his Full sun. Alain Guiraudie set up other canons by calling Félix Kysyl to put the whole village to the test of doubt. There are barely more than ten of them, but they all fall under Jérémie’s spell and cry out for mercy.
It also took, I imagine, a lot of patience and cleverness to remove the mask of Catherine Frot from Martine’s face. The mountain, no doubt, and the autumn, the accuracy of the dialogues, the authenticity of the settings, the rarity of the other actors will have been stronger than fame, this poison of the cities.
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