The title came to me while I was writing this script. For me, mercy exceeds the question of forgiveness. It has to do with empathy, with understanding others beyond any morality. It’s about reaching out to others. It’s an old-fashioned word that we don’t use much anymore, and it becomes the film well, its timelessness, and above one of the great characters in it, namely the priest.
Here, even more than in my other films, I’ve worked hard to cultivate the mystery. I’ve tried to get the viewers to ask questions and take part in the story. It’s the best way of avoiding boredom, and transcribing desire. Which, for me, is life’s great mystery. You realise pretty quickly that the hero stays here because he wants someone. Even if the whole thing is shifting. He himself is the object of desire. And I’m also very interested in the confusion that this stranger and his unclear intentions can bring. I like the fact that we don’t know who the villain is, and we don’t really know which side we’re on.
I reckon that the viewers of my films expect a few things from me nowadays; they can see more or less where I’m going. I’m well aware that I’m almost always working on the same questions, the same motifs, and I play with that, with what’s expected of me. But I also want to surprise, to surprise myself, to renew myself. Perhaps it was also time for desire not to end in sex. I don’t know if anyone’s said this before, but it seems to me that people used to film fights to avoid filming sex. In a sense, I’m going in the opposite direction. In any case, here, desire isn’t clear either, I’m not looking for resolutions, there’s also a main character who imagines things, and so must the viewers, just as I have (and still do).
There’s a real love story underlying the whole film. But there are hidden ones as well: Jérémie’s love for the dead man, and another one I won’t reveal here, as it would spoil the film too much. But it’s really about desire. Our hero is at the centre of this circulation of desire, and little by little he finds himself a prisoner of this village.