Alain Guiraudie: No Rest for the Old

The release in France this month of Misericordia, the new feature film by French director Alain Guiraudie, offers an opportunity to revisit the filmography of the filmmaker from Aveyron and to focus, within the framework of the AGE-C project, on the special place he accords to elderly characters in his films. Misericordia follows this trend. Jacques Develay, 72, plays Father Grisolle, a rural priest who develops an affection for a young baker in his thirties recently arrived in the fictive little village of Saint-Martial. Faithful to his vow of chastity, his relationship with the young man remains platonic, but he will move heaven and earth to save his companion from a tricky situation.

This type of character is emblematic of Alain Guiraudie’s cinema. In other films by the director, we encounter similar elderly characters who express their desire without restraint. Consider Louis (Jean Ségani) in That Old Moving Dream (2001), a factory worker nearing retirement in a doomed plant, who makes advances to a young technician sent to dismantle the factory’s last machines. Frequently, Alain Guiraudie depictis May-December romances, whether reciprocal or not, where the age difference is never an impediment to romantic or sexual desire. For instance, in Nobody’s Hero (2022), Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet) falls in love with Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky), a married prostitute older than him. In Staying Vertical (2016), a subtle desire develops between Léo (Damien Bonnard), a young screenwriter lacking inspiration, and Marcel (Christian Bouillette), a grumpy old man. In No Rest for the Brave (2003), Basile (Thomas Suire) has a much older lover, Roger (Roger Guidone). In his literary work (the director has published three novels), Alain Guiraudie reiterates this type of relationship, as seen in Ici commence la nuit (2014), where an attraction forms between Gilles, in his forties, and Pépé, a 98-year-old retiree.

To understand why such romances recur so frequently in Alain Guiraudie’s work, it is necessary to situate them within the context of his broader aesthetic. Alain Guiraudie has always enjoyed blending and renewing genres and myths in novel settings: the Western and fairy tales in the rural South-West of France in No Rest for the Brave, aquatic mythological monsters in Stranger by the Lake (2013), the Beast of Gévaudan in Staying Vertical, the disaster film in Clermont-Ferrand in Nobody’s Hero, or the myth of Cain and Abel alongside Christian spirituality in Misericordia. Thus, both in his narratives and in the romantic relationships he portrays on screen, Alain Guiraudie breaks free from barriers, genre norms and conventions, and stereotypes. He brings mythological elements into the everyday and ascribes a certain sexual potency to aging bodies. By portraying elderly characters as desiring or as objects of desire, Alain Guiraudie subverts conventional representations of aging. This renewal also involves the exploration of topics rarely addressed in cinema – but common in his work – such as the nudity and homosexuality of elderly people. Alain Guiraudie’s cinema thus offers a refreshing and unconventional perspective on old age, challenging our usual perceptions of aging.

Written by: Adrien Valgalier

Image credit: Misericordia, directed by Alain Guiraudie, produced by CG Cinéma, 2024