Karnard drives the characters from French director Alain Gillady's films towards an absurd and sometimes dangerous accident. In sexually daring stories that usually unfold in the countryside, the temptation of the flesh is a powerful catalyst.
“I don't know if I can say that desire is what drives everything about the film, but that certainly drives my film,” Guiladi said in a recent video interview from his Paris home via an interpreter.
That artistic mission will guide his latest photo, “Misericordia,” which will be held at US theatres on Friday. When it was announced in France, France received eight nominations for the Oscar equivalent Cesar Award, and was named the best film of 2024 by the well-known French film magazine Cahiers Du Cinéma.
The film follows Jeremy (Felix Kysil), where he returns to a small, rural town of young people, where he soon becomes the main suspect in the murder, awakening the desires of a local Catholic priest.
Guiraudie, 60, eroticism and death are intimately intertwined. “There are two situations where we return to our most primitive instincts: sex and violence,” he said. “I see a mandatory connection.”
In Guiraudie's gay cruising mystery “Stranger by The Lake,” released in the US in 2014, a young man witnesses a murder and begins a steamy sexual relationship with a killer. However, in “Misericordia”, Guiraudie put aside the trend for placing explicit images on the screen.
“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 enough sexual behavior and that in this project the character's goals were elsewhere.”
So Guiraudie chooses a character whose sexual turmoil is not satisfied and has to deal with being turned down by the object of their desires.
It was important to him to communicate that he would be rejected more often than he would consider opportunities to connect, he said. “That's because it's a reality for most gay people in the country, and perhaps the general gay people.”
Guiladi grew up on a farm near the town of Villfranche de Luhargue in the southern France, and working-class individuals who explore their impulses are the distinctive focus of his work, both as a filmmaker and as a novelist.
“I was built emotionally and sexually in that world,” Guiraudie says. “It has become politically important to impart the working class the complexity of sensuality, eroticism and desire that they felt were excluded from cinemas, television and magazines.”
However, filming sex scenes between men was not easy for Guiraudie. Early on, the director preferred to portray heterosexual lovemaking. He found it difficult to embrace and portray his own sexuality, he said.
However, it was through the film that he agreed with his desires. “I became able to socially own my homosexuality and film homosexual behavior,” he said, “it was a two complicated, linked process for me.”
According to Guiradie, films often portray sex scenes as stern and meaningful expressions of deep passion. In order to destroy it, especially in his previous films, he decides to approach sex with a light touch and laugh about its inherent ridiculousness.
“Many films have sex scenes that are simply a string of clichés,” he said. “Even porn doesn't represent reality,” he said.
Film sex scenes are often rushed to edit in jump cuts, but Guiraudie tackles them at the beginning, in the middle and at the end, as if they were a fight or dialogue scene.
“We choreography, we work together all the movements to ensure that we don't show our genitals or show any of the actors that are embarrassed,” he explained. “What I'm most interested in is connecting sex with stories, words and normal life.”
Like other French Authers (e.g. Katherine Breilatt), Giardi considers it his responsibility to work as an intimate coordinator for the set.
“It's really awful for a director to use people in that job,” he said. “My job as a director is to talk to the actors and explain to them what they need to be with and what they need to do.”
One of Guiraudie's most valuable champions, Stateside is Strand Releasing, a longtime distributor of LGBTQ and international films.
The company treated his breakthrough and his recent titles, “Staying Vertical” and “Nobody's Hero” as “Stranger by the Lake.” (Currently, the Criterion channel is streaming five of Guiraudie's previous films to match the “Misericordia” release.)
“He certainly isn't embarrassed to tackle sexuality,” said Marcus Hu, co-founder of Strand Releasing. “There's nothing taboo for Alan, and even if that's the case, he finds the relief of the comics.”
But his candidness cited the example of “Strangers by the Lake,” saying Guiraudie's film distribution options are limited. “We couldn't get the film on platforms like iTunes or Amazon,” he said.
It's been more than a decade since then, and Guiraudie said he doesn't think things have moved forward. He added that while culture is becoming increasingly reactionary and pure, it aims to create provocative art that appeals not only to LGBTQ audiences but also to a wide audience.
“My goal has always been to get out of that niche,” Guiradie said.
