Dir/Wri: Alain Guiraudie | Cast: Félix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, David Ayala | France, Thriller 102′
All over France the village bakery is becoming a thing of the past. Many places don’t even have a local bar anymore and Alain Guiraudie mourns the demise of rural life in his latest, a comic thriller, exploring repressed sexual desire and the power of the Catholic Church in a leafy French backwater.
Guiraudie’s sinister 2013 debut Stranger by the Lake, follows a familiar theme of the outsider coming to town and disrupting the status quo. But this time with a delicious twist.
It all begins with a funeral in a remote village in Aveyron, near Toulouse. The family come together to revisit past and present. The deceased, Jean-Pierre, ran the local bakery but his troubled son Vincent (Durand) is in no state to take over and his widow Martine (Frot) is in disarray. But she soon cheers up when Jeremie (Kysyl) arrrives to pay his respects. He used to work in the bakery as a teenager but has long left the village. Vincent is not keen to see him, and is irritated when his mother welcomes Jeremie back into the fold, inviting him to stay.
There’s a whiff of Claude Chabrol to this dark little dramady that sees the tight knit locals flitting between each other’s households, their apparent friendliness couching a savage air of mistrust. And while keeping their motives and backstories hidden, Guiradie keeps the tension taught through the fleeting expressions that flicker across the faces of Martine, her son Vincent, their friend Walter (Ayala), local vicar Father Grisolles (Develay), and particularly Jeremie who is the most expressive of the lot.
Clearly things have gone on in that close community, although outwardly they all appear to be straight; Martine and her husband Jean-Pierrre, Jeremie purportedly with a girlfriend back in Toulouse. But when Jeremie runs into Vincent in the woods, their rough horseplay seems to have suggestive undertones, and soon ends in tragedy whereupon Jeremie is forced to cover his tracks. He then bumps into Father Grisolles, picking mushrooms, who seems a bit too keen to offer Jeremie a lift. Jeremie makes a swift exit then swings by to catch up with his old friend Walter. After a few beers, he strips off and propositions him, Walter chasing him away with a rifle. The two later fluff over the episode, on the grounds of being drunk.
So all these interactions are ambiguous but somehow suggestive of a fluid sexuality at play. Félix Kysyl is particularly good at being all things to everyone in his role as Jeremie. For the local gendarmes, he is the number one suspect in Vincent’s disappearance, and yet his implicated guilt always appears to be the elephant in the room during questioning, his presence seems to unearth unwanted elements of guilt and remorse that have lain buried in this small community for many years.
Although they all trust in the eminence grise, Father Grisolles, we soon begin to realise that he is a subversive force, but not necessarily a force for evil as we soon discover in the film’s gripping third act where Jeremie will find salvation where he least expects it in the moody and muted autumn tints of this suspenseful and slyly amusing thriller. @MeredithTaylor
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