Félix Kysyl

A web of secrets, suspicions, and desires ensnares the inhabitants of an insular French village in this tantalizing comic thriller from ever-audacious auteur Alain Guiraudie. Returning to his rural hometown to attend the funeral of the mentor he loved, enigmatic, sexually fluid drifter Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) stirs up long-simmering feelings of lust, jealousy, and rage among those he left behind—including the dead man’s widow (Catherine Frot), her hot-tempered son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), and a curiously protective local priest (Jacques Develay) with whom Jérémie forges a twisted bond. Amid the evocatively earthy milieu, Guiraudie constructs a slippery, continuously surprising moral universe where love and hatred, eroticism and violence, spiritual grace and mortal sin, are intimately entwined.

It’s 1967, and Jean-Luc Godard is reimagining his art. His marriage to Anna Karina is over. Sensing cultural and political change in the air a full year before the unrest of May ’68, he embarks on a new film, La Chinoise, with a new woman, actress and student activist Anne Wiazemsky.