In This French Director's Work, Sex Leads to Unexpected Destinations

New York Times

19-03-2025

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.
'I don't know if you can say that desire is what drives all of cinema, but it's certainly what drives my cinema,' Guiraudie said via an interpreter during a recent video interview from his home in Paris.
That artistic mandate guides his latest picture, 'Misericordia,' which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday. When it came out in France, it received eight nominations for the César Awards, France's equivalent to the Oscars, and was named the best film of 2024 by the renowned French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.
The movie follows Jérémie (Félix 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.
For Guiraudie, 60, eroticism and death are intimately entangled. 'There are two situations in which we return to our most primitive instincts: sex and violence,' he said. 'I see an obligatory connection.'
In Guiraudie's gay cruising mystery 'Stranger by the Lake,' released in the United States in 2014, a young man witnesses a murder and then begins a steamy sexual relationship with the killer. In 'Misericordia,' however, Guiraudie set aside his proclivity for putting explicit images onscreen.
'The foundation of this project was the idea of making an erotic film with no sex scenes,' he explained. 'I told myself that I had filmed the sex act enough, and that in this project the characters' goals were elsewhere.'
So Guiraudie opted for characters whose sexual hankerings go unfulfilled and who must deal with being turned down by the objects of their desire.
It was crucial to him to convey that people are more often rejected than given the chance to connect, he said, because 'that's the reality for most gay people in the countryside, and probably for gay people in general.'
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.
'I emotionally and sexually constructed myself in that world,' said Guiraudie. 'It 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.'
Shooting sex scenes between men didn't 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.
It was through cinema, though, that he came to terms with his own desires. 'Owning my homosexuality socially and being able to film homosexual acts,' he said, 'were two intricately linked processes for me.'
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.
'Lots of films have sex scenes that are simply a succession of clichés,' he said, because we don't really know how other people have sex. 'Even pornography doesn't represent reality,' he said, leaving us with a choice: either to reveal 'something of our own private selves or invent new ways of making love.'
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.
'We choreograph, we work through all the moves together so that we're not showing the sex organs or showing anything that's going to embarrass the actors,' he explained. 'What interests me most is connecting sex with narrative, with words, with normal life.'
Like some other French auteurs (Catherine Breillat, for example), Guiraudie believes it's his responsibility to serve as the intimacy coordinator on set.
'It's really terrible that directors use people in that job,' he said. 'It's my job as a director to direct the actors, to talk to them, to be with them, to explain to them what to do.'
Stateside, one of Guiraudie's most valuable champions has been Strand Releasing, a longstanding distributor of L.G.B.T.Q. and international films.
The company handled 'Stranger by the Lake,' his breakthrough, and his recent titles 'Staying Vertical' and 'Nobody's Hero,' which, though not explicitly queer, are still sexual misadventure comedies. (The Criterion Channel is currently streaming five of Guiraudie's earlier movies to coincide with the 'Misericordia' release.)
'He's certainly not ashamed of tackling sexuality,' said Marcus Hu, Strand Releasing's co-founder. 'Nothing is taboo for Alain — and even when it is, he finds comic relief in it.'
That frankness, however, has limited distribution options for, Guiraudie's movies, Hu said, citing the example of 'Stranger by the Lake.' 'We could not get the film on platforms like iTunes or Amazon,' he said.
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.
'My goal has always been to get out of that niche,' Guiraudie said, 'to make a universal cinema by showing desires that were not universal.'