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MISERICORDIA (MISERICORDE)

Producer: Charles Gilibert   Director: Alain Guiraudie   Screenplay: Alain Guiraudie   Cast: Félix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, David Ayala, Sébastien Faglain, Tatiana Spivakova, Salomé Lopes, Serge Richard and Elio Lunetta   Distributor: Sideshow/Janus Films

Grade: B+

One detects traces of Hitchcock, of Chabrol, of Highsmith in this thriller by Alain Guiraudie (“Stranger by the Lake”), but its streak of deadpan sexual farce is sui generis.  It’s surprising how funny the film is; at times you might think the proper English translation of the title would be the exclamation “Mercy!” (which some viewers might feel prompted to shout at certain points).  Yet the bizarre mixture is engrossing and effective.

The catalyst for the action is Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl), a recessive young man who returns to his home village of Saint-Martial after spending some years in nearby Toulouse.  He’s come to show his respect at the funeral of Jean-Pierre (Serge Richard), the local baker who was his mentor—and, we will learn, more.  The dead man’s widow Martine (Catherine Frot) is pleased to welcome him back, and offers to put him up in the room once occupied by her son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who was Jérémie’s best friend but is now living with his wife Annie (Tatiana Spivakova) and their son Kilian (Elio Lunetta). 

At first Vincent, though a surly fellow by nature, is welcoming too, in his own way—he engages in roughhousing with Jérémie in which, being stronger, he always wins.  But as Jérémie shows no indication of leaving, he becomes hostile.  He’s offended by the suggestion that Jérémie might take over his late father’s shop, and even more so when Jérémie begins wearing his father’s clothes.  Jérémie is taking advantage of his mother’s kindness, he thinks, even suggesting that he might be planning to take advantage of her in other ways.

But though Jérémie talks elliptically of a girlfriend he left behind in Toulouse, it’s revealed that he was in love with Jean-Pierre.  Even now he sneaks from his bedroom to the living room to moon over photos of the dead man at the beach in the family scrapbook.  And during the day he goes for long walks in the village and the surrounding forest, connecting with Walter (David Ayala), a sloppy, overweight fellow who’s abandoned farming but still lives in his family’s house.  He also gets to know the village priest Father Grisolles (Jacques Develay), one of whose passions is searching the woods for wild mushrooms, a hobby Jérémie takes up as well, or at least pretends to.

Without revealing too much, the plot turns explicitly into thriller territory when a major character disappears.  There’s no question of how—this isn’t a whodunit, and we know the answer—but the film turns on the investigation into whether it’s a case of the person’s having been murdered or simply having run off.  The search is conducted by an intrusive cop (Sébastien Faglain), who appears to possess a skeleton key for every door in town and subscribes to the notion that confessions can best be extracted from suspects while they’re asleep, and his young assistant (Salomé Lopes); but everyone left behind is drawn into the inquiry (though, except for those already mentioned, there’s only the slightest indication that there’s anybody else living in Saint-Martial; “Misericordia” is basically a chamber piece).

But the film is hardly a police procedural.  It’s a tale of buried secrets, some of them literally so, and submerged longings, and it gets some of its funniest moments out of the fact that, as in soap operas, characters are always turning up at inopportune moments to overhear conversations they shouldn’t.  It also exults in abruptly shocking turns that reveal the underside of small town life, in a fashion similar to what Hitchcock pulled off in “Shadow of a Doubt” and Chabrol in “Le Boucher.”   A scene between Jérémie and Walter is pungent in that respect, but the most astonishing is certainly that involving a most unusual conversation in a confessional, which takes the resolution in any entirely new direction; it turns out that the nod to Hitchcock doesn’t involve only “Shadow of a Doubt” but “I Confess,” though in a fashion Hollywood would never have allowed in the fifties.

The entire cast is excellent, but among the ensemble Kysyl and Develay stand out.  Technically the film has a homespun feel, but the crew—production designer Emmanuelle Duplay and cinematographer Claire Mathon in particular—work with Guiraudie to create an almost tactile sense of place, as does editor Jean-Christophe Hym to maintain a sense of simmering tension.  Marc Verdaguer’s score is spare but has its moments.

Ultimately, though, for all the collaborative efforts “Misericordia” is the work of a true auteur, as the French critics would say, and one with a very personal perspective.                  

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A WORKING MAN

Producers: Chris Long, Jason Statham, John Friedberg, David Ayer, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Block and Kevin King Templeton   Director: David Ayer   Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone and David Ayer   Cast: Jason Statham, David Harbour, Michael Peña, Arianna Rivas, Jason Flemyng, Emmett J. Scanlan, Eve Mauro, Maximilian Osinski, Andrej Kaminsky, Greg Kolpakchi, Piotr Witkowski, Isla Gie, Chidi Ajufo, Cokie Falco, Richard Heap, Merab Ninidze, Kenneth Collard, Noemi Gonzalez, Max Croes, Ricky Champ, Alana Boden, David Witts, Kristina Poli and Joanna DeLane       Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: F

You might like to believe that the grotesquely violent, incredibly stupid “A Working Man” is intended as a spoof of the whole rotten action movie genre, but despite its parade of weird characters wearing even weirder costumes (designed by one Tiziana Corvisieri in one of the movie’s few stabs at originality), that doesn’t seem to be the case.  It may have been written, at least in part, by Sylvester Stallone, after Chuck Dixon’s 2014 novel “Levon’s Trade,” and it could be imagined as a homage to the Liam Neeson “Taken” series, but it’s actually just another brutal Jason Statham movie, though one squared, mathematically speaking, in terms of illogic and gruesomeness.

Statham, as stone-faced as ever, is Levon Cade, an ex-Royal Marine now working as a construction foreman for the Chicago firm of Joe Garcia (Michael Peña), whose wife Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) and college-age daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) help out in the office.  (The locale couldn’t look less like Chicago.  The movie was shot in England, and slapping an occasional random insert of the Chicago River and the L into the footage doesn’t make it any more convincing.)

Cade is a troubled guy, a widower living out of his car.  His father-in-law Dr. Roth (Richard Heap), who blames Levon for his wife’s suicide and has primary custody of his daughter Merry (Isla Gie)—despite his own strange garb and habits—says his son-in-law is prone to violence and is suing to end his unsupervised visits with the girl, who obviously idolizes him (cue the violins).  Levon’s lawyers tell him that Roth has a good chance of winning, given Cade’s military past and unsettled emotional state.

They have a point.  When a bunch of thugs attacks one of Cade’s crew, he demolishes them and sends them packing.  Nothing more comes of that, but Jenny has witnessed his fighting skills.

Soon after she goes partying at a sleazy bar with friends to celebrate the end of the semester and is drugged by the bartender (David Witts) and kidnapped.  The Garcias beg Cade to rescue her, but he initially refuses, worrying about giving in to his violent side.  He relents, however, and goes to his old army buddy, blind Gunny Lefferty (David Harbour), for help, including access to the reclusive fellow’s well-stocked armory, an obligatory element in such flicks as this.  (Oddly enough, Lefferty is American, as are all of Cade’s military pals.  Why such wacko off-the-grid types are always depicted with heroic auras, as Gunny, complete with an adoring wife played by Joanna DeLane, is here, is a question for someone else to consider.)                 

Anyway, Cade begins at the bar when Jenny disappeared, and waterboards the bartender to extract the name of Wolo Kolisnyk (Jason Flemyng), a member, we will eventually learn, of a Russian mob called The Brotherhood, from him.  After killing two dudes who come to visit the bartender and offhandedly shoot their associate, he tracks down Kolisnyk, tortures him and drowns him in his own swimming pool.

It would be tedious, and frankly close to impossible, to explain the further stages of Cade’s search and how one leads to the next.  One takes him to a saloon supposedly in Joliet (although it looks like a Louisiana biker bar miraculously plopped into northern Illinois, complete with drawling patrons and a security guy, named Dougie and played by Cokie Falco, who dresses like a cowboy).  There he poses as a drug dealer and strikes a deal with its proprietor Dutch (Chidi Ajufo) for an introduction to Kolisnyk’s son Dimi (Maximilian Osinski), a wayward member of The Brotherhood who wears what looks like a glam pink suit straight out of the 1970s London fashion scene. 

That connection somehow involves him with the upper echelons of The Brotherhood, embodied in Symon Kharchenko (Andrej Kaminsky), a vampiric-looking fellow who wears a black half-coat with a wide black belt and a bowler hat, and carries a cane with a silver head, and his more ordinary-looking brother Yuri (Merab Ninidze).  Symon’s muscle consists of his two doofus sons Danya (Greg Kolpakchi) and Vanko (Piotr Witkowski), clothed for some reason in shiny pastel tracksuits, one blue and the other orange, with matching caps, that represent the ultimate in anti-camouflage outerwear.

Cade regularly exhibits the expertise Statham has demonstrated in all his movies of dispatching hordes of baddies to their permanent fates.  He punches, throttles, shoots and impales scads of villains in various encounters (including Danya and Vanko, whom he disposes of even when they’ve got him tied up in a van) on his way to locating Jenny in an isolated farmhouse, where kidnappers Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan) and Artemis (Eve Mauro) have chained her to the ceiling to await their buyer, Mr. Broward (Kenneth Collard, who looks like a dissipated Dom DeLuise).  (Apparently they provide victims conforming to a purchaser’s specific requirements, like thieves who steal the particular vehicles somebody wants.)

Naturally Cade arrives in the nick of time, shoots Broward and smashes Viper to bits, while Jenny shows her dexterity by getting Artemis in a neck hold with her legs while still dangling from the ceiling and strangles her to death.  (The girl’s other talent lies in her piano playing, which seems to consist of playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata at an absurdly slow, clunky tempo.}  Our hero completes his campaign against villainy by smoothly terminating everybody else at the place, including Dutch and all his motorcycle gangsters, as well as Brotherhood gunmen Karp (Max Croes), a maniacally grinning specimen, and Nestor (Ricky Champ), a bald-headed brute, despite the fact that they’re spraying the place with their automatic rifles while he’s armed only with a special Lefferty shotgun and a few grenades.  But then a Statham hero can always be counted on to defeat multiple attackers single-handedly and avoid getting even a scratch from hails of gunfire.  He is, in effect, a superhero without a cape.  You’ll be happy to know that a couple of corrupt cops get their just deserts too, though not at his hand.

This is an extremely ugly film, in terms of both its potboiler treatment of sex trafficking and its extraordinary volume of violence.  It’s also a menace to the moviegoing public, since it leaves two major Brotherhood figures alive, and Dixon’s novel is just one in a twelve-book series; sequels might be forthcoming.

It’s also an ugly movie visually, with a shabby production design (Nigel Evans) and murky cinematography (Shawn White) that, combined with chaotic action choreography by director David Ayer and his team and the jerky editing by Fred Raskin, leaves the fight-and-firepower sequences a bloody mess.  Among the cast the supporting turns range from barely adequate to grossly amateurish, but then the villains are meant to be caricatures and Cade’s friends and family pallid sketches.  Exceptions are Rivas, who shows some spunk, and Gie, who’s sickeningly sweet.  

Near the close of “A Working Man,” Jenny surveys the wreckage of the place where she’d been held captive and defiantly raises two middle fingers.  Perceptive viewers may feel that the gesture is actually directed by the filmmakers at them.