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In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Alain Guiraudie's The King of Escape (2009) is showing from February 12 - March 14, 2017 in the United Kingdom as part of the special The Rom Com Variations.Few contemporary filmmakers make movies as defiantly uncategorizable as French director Alain Guiraudie’s. Last year’s Staying Vertical, his first film to compete in the Cannes competition slate, was a kind of surreal pastoral, a freewheeling yet keenly structured rumination on writer's block, provincialism and familial responsibility. Stranger by the Lake, the film that first garnered Guiraudie some (semi-)mainstream success in 2013, is a Hitchcockian thriller of sorts, an intoxicating eros-thanatos dance set in its eponymous, sun-dappled locale. If those descriptions are rather non-committal, that's because pinning down Guiraudie’s films to specifics—of genre, story, or otherwise—is a tricky affair; the only constant is his idiosyncratic, iconoclastic sensibility. Case in...