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.                  

Producers: Casey Silver and Gregory Jacobs   Director: Steven Soderbergh   Screenplay: David Koepp   Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Pierce Brosnan, Gustaf Skarsgård, Kae Alexander, Orli Shuka and Daniel Dow   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: B+

The latest collaboration between Steven Soderbergh (who not only directs but serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews and as editor under the name Mary Ann Bernard) and writer David Koepp is a clever but basically inconsequential tale of skullduggery in the  British intelligence service.  It’s Le Carré Lite, but elegantly constructed and acted, as enjoyable as the popular “Knives Out” puzzlers.

The plot begins with imperturbable George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) being assigned by his superior Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) the task of uncovering the identity of a mole in the agency who’s stolen the operational plan of the story’s MacGuffin, Severus.  The device can be employed, we’ve eventually told, to set off a disastrous reaction in a nuclear plant. 

George is given the names of five suspects.  The first four are Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a boozer and womanizer irked over being passed over for promotion; Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), a ramrod-stiff military type; Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), a saucy data analyst; and Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), the agency’s resident therapist.  The fifth, Meacham explains apologetically, is Woodhouse’s own wife, coolly glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett).

George’s methods are simplified by the fact that the four outsiders are romantically involved, Freddie with Clarissa and Zoe with James.  So he invites them all over for dinner with him and Kathryn, loosening their tongues with some food additives to provide him with clues to follow.  He then spices things up with a nasty parlor game to encourage inadvertent revelations.

Beyond saying that his scheme works, it would be churlish to go into too much detail about what follows.  Suffice it to note that as events unfold there will be, in no particular order, a murder; a clandestine meeting with the emissary (Orli Shuka) of an ambitious Russian expatriate (Daniel Dow); a secret Swiss bank account with a substantial balance; a drone attack; secret surveillance of an agent via satellite; and the disposal of a body in a lake.  Not to mention a marathon run of polygraph tests, presented by director-editor Soderbergh in a cheekily insouciant montage.  And lurking behind everything is the agency’s supremely supercilious head Arthur Steiglitz (Pierce Brosnan), who, in one simultaneously hilarious and upsetting scene, shows a predilection for lunching on Ikizukuri.

In everything that happens is an undercurrent of infidelity, whether it be in terms of treason to one’s country or faithlessness in personal relationships.  It’s revealed early on that Meacham, who instigates George’s search for the mole, is at odds with his wife Anna (Kae Alexander).  And when Freddie’s dalliances with other women confirm Clarissa’s suspicions, her reaction is one of the film’s major shocks.

But the chief marital question, of course, revolves around George and Kathryn.  Protocol requires them to keep professional secrets from one another—“black bag” is the shorthand all the agents use to refer to some part of the job they can’t divulge to anyone—and each of the spouses keeps things from one another over the course of the week George has been allotted for his investigation.  Is their frequently-expressed devotion a ruse?  Is Kathryn the traitor her husband will have to expose? 

All will be resolved by the close of this delicious if not terribly nutritious confection, stylishly appointed by production designer Philip Messina and costumer Ellen Mirojnick and given added verve by David Holmes’s jazz-inflected score.  The performances are spot-on, with Blanchett’s icily seductive, coyly suggestive Kathryn a perfect counterpoint to Fassbender’s George, penetratingly intense under his sly show of reserve.  (A story early on about his treatment of his own father is a jewel.)  All of the others encapsulate their characters’ personalities—Burke Freddie’s petulant defensiveness, Abela Clarissa’s impudent assertiveness, Page James’s rigorous self-confidence, and Harris Vaughan’s prim professional demeanor.  Brosnan, meanwhile, is enormously amusing as a James Bond type gone to seed.

Ultimately “Black Bag” is an exercise in gamesmanship, on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers and actors who have fashioned them with such finesse.  If in the end the game doesn’t prove to amount to much—there’s none of the dark introspection about spycraft that one finds in Le Carré—it’s certainly pleasurable to watch the twists and turns as they play out.