There are currently a couple of very fine French movies playing in and around London and the UK, but since each is what many in the industry regard as a ‘small film’ – lasting a mere 100 minutes or so, with no stars, dealing with more or less ordinary people leading more or less ordinary lives in rural France – you may need to be quick if you want to see them in a cinema. One, When Autumn Falls, is by the highly prolific, largely successful François Ozon, whose best known titles include Under the Sand and Eight Women; the other, Misericordia (pictured top), is by the considerably less prolific and less box-office-friendly Alain Guiraudie, probably best known, if at all, for That Old Dream That Moves (aka Real Cool Time), which Jean-Luc Godard famously singled out for praise, and Stranger by the Lake, which my Australian critic friend David Stratton, sitting next to me at the Cannes press show, aptly likened to ‘gay porn directed by Bresson’. Actually, both Ozon (now 57) and Guiraudie (60) have made their fair share of ‘queer cinema’, though the results have tended to be quite different. The work of the versatile Ozon, whether camp, straight or somewhere in-between in tone, is generally known for its stylistic polish, lightness and elegance, whereas that of Guiraudie is often notable for an indefinable, faintly surreal strangeness, sometimes drifting between quotidian naturalism and realms of myth or fantasy; he also has a talent for casting quite unusual actors. (I recall, having loved That Old Dream That Moves, encouraging my pals Nick James and Jonathan Romney to join me for a screening of its predecessor, Sunshine for the Poor; we all emerged a little nonplussed by the impenetrably weird ‘comedy’ we’d just experienced.)
Notwithstanding the occasional unevenness of their work, both Ozon and Guiraudie are without doubt ambitious, intelligent and impressive filmmakers with distinctive creative personalities, so I usually try to check out their new movies whenever I can. And When Autumn Falls and Misericordia are, in my opinion, well worth catching. On many levels, they appear to be quite different. The former centres on an elderly woman, living in a small town in Burgundy, who’s having problems with anxieties about senile dementia and a seemingly hostile daughter, and who takes solace from a friend with a son in prison. The latter centres on a young-ish man, based in Toulouse, who returns to the Aveyron hamlet he grew up in for the funeral of a baker who taught him his trade, and stays on longer than expected.
I’m not going to reveal more about plot details – I hate spoilers and, besides, a virtue of these films is that neither develops as one might expect from the initial scenes; both regularly provide (pleasingy plausible) surprises. But what struck me, watching the two movies a few days apart (I saw the Guiraudie first), is how much they have in common, despite their very different narratives, moods and stylistic tropes. Each film, very soon, offers a religious sermon, but it was not until, some minutes further in, I noticed that each featured a slightly similar scene of mushrooming that I realised they might, in fact, be dealing with similar motifs and themes. Indeed they were: both films deal, in their separate ways, with town life and country life; the parameters of family and friendship; sexuality and unspoken desire; deceit and shared secrets; the burden and legacy of the past; childhood bedrooms, toys and memories; age, death, loss and grief; notions of sin, support, trust and forgiveness; the church and the law, justice and ethics; faith and sacrifice, intention and consequence. In other words, despite their modest running times and resources (and I must add that both are very beautifully shot, wonderfully acted and brilliantly edited), When Autumn Falls and Misericordia are richly rewarding; they would make a superb double-bill, if such things still existed. But if you can only catch one of them for now, I recommend you do so. Cinema this thought-provoking, this unbothered by genre expectations, this satisfyingly serious in its concerns, however witty and entertaining, is not as readily available as it could or should be.
When Autumn Falls and Misericordia are both currently screening in UK cinemas.
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 