An anti-Disney morality tale seeks modern morality.
It’s easy for conservative pundits to reiterate their frustration with the latest progressive Disney product, such as the new live-action version of Snow White, but they leave out its important difference from the 1937 animated release Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that put Walt Disney’s company on the map. More than being woke, the new pared-down Snow White reflects a change in social attitudes. (Disney replaced the Grimm Brothers’ Anglo-Saxon princess with a Latino heroine played by left-wing activist Rachel Zegler and replaced the Seven Dwarfs with tiny CGI “magical” creatures.)
This is such a dangerous cultural realignment that the best way to approach it is not by recapitulating the old race, sex, and social arguments, but precisely by recognizing the new values and what they mean. For that, it’s essential to compare Snow White with Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia.
Guiraudie’s newest film is an adult Grimm’s fairy tale that combines romance with disrupted social customs. It re-creates the lessons of old fables in Millennial terms. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an introvert with a harelip, returns from the city to attend the funeral of a local tradesman in the town of his birthplace, a village known for its rustic bakery but that harbors unsuspected behavioral secrets. While Disney specializes in childhood grooming, Guiraudie makes tales that challenge grown-up expectations. Jérémie’s homecoming isn’t just dutiful, he comes back to respect the man he once loved and, in the process, stirs up the deepest hypocrisies of the townsfolk.
The new Snow White represents progressive mediocrity — the antagonism between Snow White and her evil stepmother (Gal Gadot) is bland and uninteresting after the remarkable modern version White as Snow that starred Lou de Laâge and Isabelle Huppert. Since conservative filmgoers can’t fight Disney on its trite progressive-commercial terms, they should welcome that Guiraudie sets up provocative circumstances, going deeper than childhood fantasy.
Guiraudie outstrips the feminism of White as Snow director Anne Fontaine. He mixes heterosexual and homosexual provocation: Jérémie incites the anger of former paramours — the hermit Walter (David Ayala) and childhood friend Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), who is the son of the widow Martine (Catherine Frot) — all spelling out personal, individual, queer identities.
Jean-Luc Godard praised Guiraudie’s 2001 debut film, The Old Dream That Moves, for its rigorous insight into the idiosyncrasies aroused by a new employee at a soon-to-close factory. Godard recognized Guiraudie’s kinship to the cultural adventure of classic cinema — such films as The Trouble with Harry and Bad Day at Black Rock, Hollywood murder mysteries that are antecedents to the mixture of suspense, surprise, and empathy in the esoterically titled Misericordia.
The strange understanding that Guiraudie extends is richer than any of Disney’s fake family fantasies. Guiraudie explores guilt, eccentricity, and desire that Disney is neither honest nor mature enough to entertain. Jérémie attracts a new lover in the parish, Father Griseul (Jacques Develay), who freakishly remembers the moral complications of his religious role. (“Is there a point punishing a murderer? Don’t underestimate the power of desire. I can love everyone. We all ‘square it.’”)
Misericordia takes us beyond the facetious simplicities of a woke Snow White (not awoken from a poison apple but in this Millennial case rising to express anti-romantic, misandrist female agency). Opposed to Disney’s remake, Guiraudie’s peculiar storytelling rescues us from the un-fun far-left falsehoods — as in Staying Vertical and Nobody’s Hero. His new high-flown joking title evokes a serious Catholic sense of pity and compassion but also recalls the epigraph that opened Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, which promised “a comedy in six parts, full of excitement, suspense, logic, cruelty, and madness like the fairy tales we tell children to help them endure their lives until death.”
Godard recognized a true film-buff cineaste in Guiraudie, who follows Fassbinder and the same path that Hitchcock took in the village quirks of The Trouble with Harry, and Spencer Tracy’s one-armed lawman in Bad Day at Black Rock — and then Guiraudie makes and finds modern revelations. He doesn’t merely repeat Hollywood’s generic narrative; that attempt ruined his best-known film, Stranger by the Lake. But in Misericordia, part murder mystery, part erotic comedy, Guiraudie deliberately seeks complication rather than Disney complacency.