Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Courtesy of MUBI.

Misericordia/Miséricorde

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alain Guiraudie

Grand Tour

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Miguel Gomes

I sometimes worry that my habit of writing about two new releases together—stolen, like the credits/ratings block immediately above, from Jonathan Rosenbaum—can feel like a crutch. True, it can sometimes provide a productive, logical point of comparison, and just as often it can come as something of a challenge. But in this instance, it’s meant, at least at the outset, as a means of saving time, of allowing me to write at length about two of my favorite films of the decade thus far without needing to shortchange one or the other by “consigning” it to a capsule review, or taking even longer than I already have in my delayed writing and publication of what you’re reading now. Of course, this very act of combination could be seen as an implicit denigration, meaning that the films either aren’t worth my time and effort to tackle individually or that they can’t stand up by themselves. That (I hope) incorrect assumption is something I’m willing to risk, for the sake of various other competing obligations (for this website and in the actually “important” things in the “real world”).

That being said, the more I think about these two films, the more parallels present themselves. In an earlier, embryonic version of this piece concerned solely with the first film, I noted that from my vantage point, the early to mid-2010s seemed like an unusual time period, full of filmmakers who established themselves with what appeared to be a breakthrough hit; some of them have gone on to become part of what might be considered the film festival mainstay, while others have receded in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another. Alain Guiraudie seems to me the clearest and most understandable example, given the particular confluence of thriller mechanics, frank gay sexuality, and rigorous form offered by 2013’s Stranger by the Lake. However, Miguel Gomes isn’t far behind, even though 2012’s Tabu ultimately had a marginally smaller footprint when it was released. Both continue to operate as statements, even milestones, pure expressions of fated desire as filtered through Guiraudie’s stunningly casual treatment of cruising within precise, locked-down frames and Gomes’s two-part, black-and-white meditation on colonialism present and past, eventually slipping into his own unique take on silent cinema.

Guiraudie and Gomes have each released two feature film projects within a year of each other since then, neither to close the same fanfare. The former’s case is perhaps more banal: Staying Vertical, despite a surprise Cannes competition berth, was too willfully weird to attract a wide audience, and Nobody’s Hero, despite its considerable strengths, was doomed by a reluctant festival rollout and risky treatment of its terrorism backdrop. Gomes, for his part, went both bigger and smaller: the ambitious three-part epic Arabian Nights, all components of which premiered at the same time, was destined to confuse listmakers and cinephiles alike, while the lowkey lockdown film The Tsugua Diaries (co-directed with his artistic and life partner Maureen Fazendeiro) was a minor work by its very nature.

At last year’s Cannes, Guiraudie and Gomes took unexpected paths towards some semblance of critical acclaim. The French director’s Misericordia bowed in the non-competitive Cannes Premiere section, a post-COVID addition widely perceived as a backhanded compliment and tertiary tier of programming amid the main selection, generating nearly as many comments expressing disbelief that it was not in Competition as Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka from the previous year put together. For his part, the Portuguese director did appear in Cannes Competition for the first time with Grand Tour, winning an unexpected yet very well-deserved Best Director prize from the jury. In the usual fashion, they both received US theatrical releases earlier this year, coming out in back-to-back weeks in March.

Much of the (separate) discussion around these two films has hinged around a crucial concept: a filmmaker knowingly revisiting the style of his past works, whether to recapture something of a past glory or not. Both Misericordia and Grand Tour seem to call back specifically to Stranger by the Lake and Tabu, respectively, and it’s certainly no accident that these somewhat more palatable modes have been received as something of a return to form. Guiraudie’s film does indeed return to the openly queer murder mystery framework, while Gomes issued another bifurcated black-and-white tale of thwarted colonialist romance conveyed through archaic cinematic methods. But to reduce these two films, and their elaborations upon past successes, is to risk taking two master filmmakers for granted, even considering their recent reemergence into the wider cinephile consciousness.

As might be inferred by my shorter enumeration, Misericordia shares less in common with Guiraudie’s past work than Grand Tour does with Gomes’s. Like those films, however, it begins fully in media res, a long winding opening shot from the perspective of a car that eventually enters Saint-Martial, a remote village in the French countryside. The driver is Jérèmie (Félix Kysyl), a young man returning to his hometown on the occasion of his baker mentor’s funeral. Though he initially plans to leave that same night, the baker’s wife Martine (Catherine Frot) urges him to stay, and so begins an indefinite period of time spent in the company of the local villagers, including Martine’s son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), former acquaintance Walter (David Ayala), and the local priest (Jacques Develay).

Though the aforementioned violence does occur remarkably early and acts as the nominal plot engine for Misericordia‘s second two-thirds, Guiraudie establishes early on that there is much more on his mind than another tale of a h(a)unted man. The most immediate impression is of a specific, unusual sense of routine within an environ that is—to Jérèmie at least—both old and new. He is frequently seen walking in the yellowing forests from the relatively few locations that constitute the bulk of the film’s centers of activity, a purely beautiful backdrop of foliage and mountains (captured by Guiraudie’s frequent collaborator Claire Mathon) that often dwarfs Jérèmie and those he interacts with. Across innumerable glasses of pastis, several physical and/or verbal fights of varying levels of intensity, and various criss-crossing attractions (mostly between men), the interplay between the expansive outdoors and cramped interiors comes to form an odd mirror for the situation that Jérèmie has found himself in.

As his moral struggle increases in prominence, so too does the priest’s role, in a manner not dissimilar from the lonely straight man played by Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake. Aside from some chance interactions, the intertwining of Jérèmie and the priest truly begins with one of the most remarkable scenes to ever take place in a confessional, an veiled outpouring of dedication and doubt that bursts open Guiruadie’s carefully couched conversations. Though the film’s title—Latin for mercy—is never uttered onscreen, this scene and another between the two men on a cliff overlooking the village communicate in unexpectedly forthright terms all that goes into such a concept, which involves forgiveness of both the other and the self. With these elements coming to form the more thematic framework, Misericordia is able to also incorporate characters and narratives closer to farce, including a pair of dogged yet polite police officers whose presence only further muddies the waters of Guiraudie’s characteristically slippery relationship between reality and dreams. The final note is one of total ambiguity, an unexpected note given to an unexpected person that refuses any hint of finality, one final gambit in a continual highwire act between hilarity, suspense, and heartrending emotion.

If Misericordia only gets more fascinating as it unfolds, Grand Tour is a marvel from its production concept alone. It is composed of what might be considered two separate tendencies: the narrative, which follows the story of a British civil servant (Edward, played by Gonçalo Waddington) who flees across Asia in the year 1918, pursued by his betrothed Molly (Crista Alfaite), which is told from first his perspective, then hers on obvious soundstages in Portugal shot in black-and-white by Rui Poças; and the non-narrative, which incorporates black-and-white and color footage shot in modern times with no attempts to hide the century-long gap between the diegesis of the story and the new aspects of the present; much of it was shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, but the sections in China were shot (due to lockdown protocol) by Gui Liang, with Gomes directing remotely from across the country.

Over all of this, there is narration given by unnamed voices who speak in the language of the country Edward, then Molly is in at the time, and it is this wild collision of voices and past and present that gives Grand Tour so much of its spark. It is crucial that Gomes does not attempt to disguise what many have already characterized as an excessively Orientalist lens. There is never any point at which the film is unaware of the distance that exists between it and everything it is depicting: the gap in time between it and the Western characters, and the gap in perspective between it and the locales it is existing within. Like Molly’s continual pursuit of Edward, there is the constant sense of searching, during which Gomes’s unique methodology allows him to open up the film to the possibility of experiencing all that the world has to offer.

That being said, Grand Tour wouldn’t be as successful if Gomes lacked an investment in the central dynamic. Part of this is courtesy of the sneakily coherent structure of his screenplay (co-written with Fazendeiro, Telmo Churro, and Mariana Ricardo), which progresses rapidly through Edward’s hapless travails and then diverges from them during Molly’s retracing of his steps, throwing in additional characters which complicate and delay her quest in unexpected, often amusing ways. It also becomes clear that the ardor and care with which Gomes captures both halves of the twinned journeys form a metonym for the passion that Molly has for Edward despite his parting; Alfaite’s performance, full of exuberance and bemused determination, seems to represent Gomes’s perspective better than the shambling Waddington. By the end, which feels like a grand Classical Hollywood exit, the sights and sounds that the viewer experiences alongside these two people are overpowering, a reminder of all that remains to be seen.