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Carnal urges drive the characters in the films of the French director Alain Guiraudie toward absurd and sometimes dangerous mishaps. In his sexually audacious narratives, which usually play out in the countryside, the temptation of the flesh is a potent catalyst.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if you can say that desire is what drives all of cinema, but it\u2019s certainly what drives my cinema,\u201d Guiraudie said via an interpreter during a recent video interview from his home in Paris.<\/p>\n
That artistic mandate guides his latest picture, \u201cMisericordia,\u201d which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday. When it came out in France, it received eight nominations<\/a> for the C\u00e9sar Awards, France\u2019s equivalent to the Oscars, and was named the best film of 2024<\/a> by the renowned French film magazine Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma.<\/p>\n The movie follows J\u00e9r\u00e9mie (F\u00e9lix Kysyl) as he returns to the small rural town of his youth, where he soon becomes the prime suspect in a murder, while also awakening the lust of the local Catholic priest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For Guiraudie, 60, eroticism and death are intimately entangled. \u201cThere are two situations in which we return to our most primitive instincts: sex and violence,\u201d he said. \u201cI see an obligatory connection.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Guiraudie\u2019s gay cruising mystery \u201cStranger by the Lake<\/a>,\u201d released in the United States in 2014, a young man witnesses a murder and then begins a steamy sexual relationship with the killer. In \u201cMisericordia,\u201d however, Guiraudie set aside his proclivity for putting explicit images onscreen.<\/p>\n \u201cThe foundation of this project was the idea of making an erotic film with no sex scenes,\u201d he explained. \u201cI told myself that I had filmed the sex act enough, and that in this project the characters\u2019 goals were elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n So Guiraudie opted for characters whose sexual hankerings go unfulfilled and who must deal with being turned down by the objects of their desire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was crucial to him to convey that people are more often rejected than given the chance to connect, he said, because \u201cthat\u2019s the reality for most gay people in the countryside, and probably for gay people in general.\u201d<\/p>\n Guiraudie grew up on a farm near the town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue, in southern France, and working-class individuals exploring their impulses is a signature focus of his work, both as a filmmaker and as a novelist.<\/p>\n \u201cI emotionally and sexually constructed myself in that world,\u201d said Guiraudie. \u201cIt became politically important for me to give the working class the sensuality, eroticism, and complexity of desire that I felt it was excluded from in cinema, television and magazines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Shooting sex scenes between men didn\u2019t come easy for Guiraudie, however. Early on, the director preferred portraying heterosexual lovemaking. He found it difficult to accept and depict his own sexuality, he said.<\/p>\n It was through cinema, though, that he came to terms with his own desires. \u201cOwning my homosexuality socially and being able to film homosexual acts,\u201d he said, \u201cwere two intricately linked processes for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Cinema, Guiraudie said, has often portrayed sex scenes as solemn and meaningful expressions of deep passion. To subvert that, especially in his earlier films, he decided to approach sex with a lighter touch and to laugh about its inherent ridiculousness.<\/p>\n \u201cLots of films have sex scenes that are simply a succession of clich\u00e9s,\u201d he said, because we don\u2019t really know how other people have sex. \u201cEven pornography doesn\u2019t represent reality,\u201d he said, leaving us with a choice: either to reveal \u201csomething of our own private selves or invent new ways of making love.\u201d<\/p>\n Sex scenes in movies are often hastily edited with jump cuts, but Guiraudie tackles them as if they were a fight or dialogue scene, with a beginning, a middle and an end.<\/p>\n \u201cWe choreograph, we work through all the moves together so that we\u2019re not showing the sex organs or showing anything that\u2019s going to embarrass the actors,\u201d he explained. \u201cWhat interests me most is connecting sex with narrative, with words, with normal life.\u201d<\/p>\n Like some other French auteurs (Catherine Breillat<\/a>, for example), Guiraudie believes it\u2019s his responsibility to serve as the intimacy coordinator on set.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really terrible that directors use people in that job,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s my job as a director to direct the actors, to talk to them, to be with them, to explain to them what to do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Stateside, one of Guiraudie\u2019s most valuable champions has been Strand Releasing, a longstanding distributor of L.G.B.T.Q. and international films.<\/p>\n The company handled \u201cStranger by the Lake,\u201d his breakthrough, and his recent titles \u201cStaying Vertical\u201d and \u201cNobody\u2019s Hero,\u201d which, though not explicitly queer, are still sexual misadventure comedies. (The Criterion Channel is currently streaming five of Guiraudie\u2019s earlier movies<\/a> to coincide with the \u201cMisericordia\u201d release.)<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s certainly not ashamed of tackling sexuality,\u201d said Marcus Hu, Strand Releasing\u2019s co-founder. \u201cNothing is taboo for Alain \u2014 and even when it is, he finds comic relief in it.\u201d<\/p>\n That frankness, however, has limited distribution options for, Guiraudie\u2019s movies, Hu said, citing the example of \u201cStranger by the Lake.\u201d \u201cWe could not get the film on platforms like iTunes or Amazon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n More than a decade has passed since then, and Guiraudie said that he did not think things had moved forward. He added that, though culture was becoming increasingly reactionary and puritanical, he still aims to create provocative art that appeals to a broad audience, not only to L.G.B.T.Q. viewers.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal has always been to get out of that niche,\u201d Guiraudie said, \u201cto make a universal cinema by showing desires that were not universal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n