POLOU, DELADONCHAMPS, LAKE

Tightly constructed French thriller set at a gay nude beach, with explicit sex

L'Inconnu du lac, a movie entirely set in a nude gay cruising area by a forest lake in the south of France, first was shown safely in the separate Un Certain Regard section at Cannes May 2013, where its overt sexual content didn't have to submit to the conventional "competition" scrutiny or the mainstream press, and it won a lot of positive buzz by viewers surprised at discovering it. Upon its French release it won critical raves. This is understandable. Stranger by the Lake (the English title has a classic Forties Hollywood sound, as noted by Jérôme Momcilovic of Cronic'art.com ) is a thriller set in a milieu straight audiences (and some gay ones) are unfamiliar with. This is a little bit as if John Retchy's bold 1967 novel of gay sexual desperation Numbers had been filmed as a murder mystery; there is a similar formal, repetitious structure. But it's a Whodunit where we know who did it. The dark, hunky, mustachioed Michel (Christophe Paou) did it. The question is what the young blond Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who witnesses it but then falls for Michel, is going to do, and what Michel will do to Franck if he knows he knows. Stranger by the Lake is notable for its observation of the unities, its tense excitement and its tight, economical structure. Cahiers du Cinéma says it's the best of Guiraudie's seven films, which they've seen (I haven't). It is a well-constructed thriller but it also has a mythical, fantastic dimension. As Stéphane Leblanc of 20 Minutes says, it's a fairy tale with a pretty (male) innocent ("joli Poucet") and a wicked wolf who pops out when night falls. And if it's Hitchcock, it's also Eric Rohmer's Summer's Tale, says Leblanc.

First let's talk about the sex, and then Hitchcock. The sex is explicit. The pebbly beach is a nude beach, and the men lie on it stripped. Cruising doesn't mean dating or pickups. It means anonymous sex, there and then or back in the woods. (When it's repeated it's no longer anonymous.) There is even a shot of a man masturbating with another man and an erect penis amply ejaculating, and fellatio, and repeated fucking. There is just enough of this to show and acknowledge that it's the main thing going on. The film isn't porn, though the conservative or uninitiated may say it is. These overt moments (and only moments) are not there to turn you on (or off) but to establish what goes on in the setting. And how it goes on. In his no-nonsense treatment of sex Guiraudie may succeed in "outing" himself in a way he hasn't before. He may also desensitivize straight audiences to gay sex in a new way. The French already had the hippest most world-weary gay filmmaker, the prolific actor-auteur Jacques Nolot. They also had the most artistic of gay porn (or any porn?) filmmakers, the immortal Jean-Daniel Cadinot. So that a French filmmaker got overt gay sex into a thriller for the first time? Not so surprising.

And yes, Hitchcock. Guiraudie has definitely created a Hitchcockian mood, which various critics have commented on. He has that Hitchcockian character, a voyeur who inadvertently witnesses a murder -- Franck watching Michel, whom he desires, and seeing him drown his partner in the lake, and who is later himself by association guilty, perhaps titillated. And there are odd onlookers, notably Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao). Henri befriends Franck and the relationship continues as they both come to the lake every day. Henri isn't thin, muscular, or cool looking. He's decidedly paunchy and bad cruising material. He also says he's straight, and is only coming here because he's broken up with his girlfriend, is on vacation, is lonely, and knows he can talk to people here without being thought weird. Henri's ambiguous presence is slightly comical and one of several light notes, the others brought chiefly by a discreet but ever-present cop, Inspector Demroder (Jérôme Chappatte), who becomes part of the scene after the body is found. Demroder's questions are insistent, sometimes telling, sometimes droll. Most Hitchcockian of all, the movie becomes progressively more and more suspenseful, almost excruciatingly so in the final moments -- then leaving us hanging. The director appears in the movie too.

The nudity and cruising still go on, and Demroder critiques this. What kind of community, he asks Franck, says nothing when one of them disappears, his clothes and shoes and towel sitting on the grass for days unclaimed, and, after a possible murder is found, the cruising and sex continue? No community at all. Thus Guiraudie, who also scripted, himself points to the cold, anonymous aspect of his own world. Not all gay men, of course, like anonymous sex, even when they're young; I didn't. But it is a fact of gay life, even post-AiDS.

Franck's relationship with Michel is amoral. Michel's murder adds to its excitement for him. The relationship is so obviously risky and dangerous that when they fuck, they agree to do so unprotected. Why does Franck fall in love with a murderer? Michel, who won't allow them to meet away from the lake, exemplifies a cold, pure-sex side of gay life that the movie frames as murderous. But Franck's passion is also amour fou, a kind of destructive love that is universal, not strictly homo or hetero.

The neat, formal, repetitious construction takes the form of a succession of days at the lake. Michel disappears at first, and reappears. The friendship between Franck and the straight guy Henri, who does not cruise, does not strip and does not swim, continues. It becomes warmer too. Henri becomes a sympathetic ear for Franck. Henri has bad days too and grows to need Franck. Michel is as hot for Franck as vice versa. But when the corpse is found and the inspector arrives on the scene things change. The parking lot and the individual cars are part of the accelerating rhythm. The days end there. But Michel won't allow Franck to follow him. Franck stays on till dark. And then the parking lot comes to seem dangerous as well as a symbol of separation.

Stranger by the Lake/L'Inconnu du lac, 97 mins., introduced at Cannes'2013 where it won Un Certain winner of the Queer Palm and Un Certain Regard Best Director. When screened for press as part of the New York Film Festival after the third four-hour film in the first week, Lav Diaz's interminable and molasses-slow North, the End of History, and when the urbane John Wildman, communications officer of the FSLC, announced the run-time, there was applause. But there's more that's good about it than compact length. A warning. As an IMDb "user" commented, it's "extremely explicit," and "not for the squeamish or conservative." In his Cannes Tweet review Mike D'Angelo telegraphed the warning, "Might be too straight for this, as it's pretty close to being gay porn w/an unusually hefty plot." The Films du Losange release will be distributed in the US by Strand Releasing. US theatrical release (limited) coming 24 January 2014.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.