L'inconnu du lac (Stranger at the Lake)

It’s understandable that Guiraudie won the best director of Un certain regard at Cannes this year, since for the most part L’inconnu du lac is a very tight piece of work, effectively exploring the time and place of a single location and milieu and unobtrusively depicting the mores of a gay lakeside cruising ground, as well as charting the uncertainties that blossom as a new relationship deepens, and building with a skillful slow-burn to a long final shot of exquisite tension.

Since it occurs at the end of the film’s second day, it’s giving little away to reveal that handsome young Franck observes a murder at dusk (in another remarkably long, tense shot). Much of the rest of the film is a dance of avoidance, denial, and animal attraction between Franck and his new lover, playing out as it might between any new couple, slightly wary of giving too much away, except here the stakes are much higher.

The other part of the film’s project is a depiction of this very particular place. We arrive each day in turn with Franck (and the film confines itself exclusively to the lake and its environs) and gradually get to know a few of the regular habits of the cruising ground, along with some of the regulars (the most prominent being the harmless podgy man who wanks in the woods – his function is nothing more than comic relief but he’s more than funny enough to justify his presence). Most effectively, the banality of the opening shot – cars parked haphazardly at the edge of the woods – becomes an important signifier through repetition, depending on which cars are, or are not, there.

 

Guiraudie’s camera (under DP Claire Mathon) repeatedly turns itself skyward, to the treetops, the lowering sun, and ominous clouds, or descends to catch the noonday or evening light on the waves in rather lovely abstract compositions. Like the repeated view off the parking area, these apparently empty shots gain power through accretion, transitions of afternoon to evening clearly and beautifully delineated to capture the sameness of those lazy, identical summer vacation days. The blazing sunlight and lush greenery, however, give way come nightfall to the startling beams of headlights and the sinister blackness of the woods.

One may as well mention too that Guiraudie does not shirk on the main point of the place. Most of the cast and extras are naked most of the time, and there’s a healthy amount of love-making, occasionally explicit though never solely for titillation. A lengthy coupling between the main pair is shot and cut to rank with the best sex scenes in cinema in terms of presenting both physicality and feeling, and they also get a couple of nice romantic moments in crepuscular silhouette on the beach.

All this is excellent, but the two main supporting characters are a little problematic. The spidery police inspector (a perfect Jérôme Chappatte), who pops up with amusing unexpectedness, seems to have a bugbear about the apparent callousness of these people; his comments and disbelief at the lake’s habitués’ easy return to routine mere days after the death of “one of your own” is meant presumably to demonstrate how even an astute and observant outsider may not fully understand the workings of this community, but comes off at best as stating the obvious, at worst as uncountered moralizing which therefore takes on a tinge of directorial comment (the question is: is it ok to take the stand that one dude’s as good as another and some dude got killed, so what?)

The other significant character is the lonesome, fat-bellied Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), sitting a little removed from the main cruising ground each day. Franck swims up to him on the first day and a rather sweet friendship develops. Henri too is an outsider, with no interest in picking up men, and although he does not judge, his sincere assumption that most of those here have wives or girlfriends at home, and are just homo on the side, from time to time, is an almost unbelievable anachronism. The real problem, however, is that the finale reveals his presence to be most useful as a device to facilitate the film’s denouement, in a display of character motivation that feels far more familiar from fiction than from real life.

A couple of other instances of motivation require a pinch of salt also: this is an astonishingly foolhardy place to commit a murder, a place full of heads ever-ready to turn and look, and where searching eyes prowl the woods. The act can be read as a spur-of-the-moment decision, but the lack of character development in the perpetrator (quite the opposite, in fact, in the final scene as what few implied shadings are stripped away to reveal a basic bogeyman) gives no clue; likewise Franck’s willingness to put himself in danger, at first in general, and later in a specific replay of what he witnessed.

That said, Pierre Deladonchamps’ performance is spot-on, proverbially young, dumb and full of cum, with active, often wounded eyes that convey the thought processes, but suggest that these are nonetheless none too profound. And as the object of his lust, dashingly mustachioed Christophe Paou is a convincing-enough hunk of meat to make the blind attraction wholly believable. The flaws are minor: these attractive performances, presented with an impressive control of pacing, time and place, and the no-nonsense handling of the whole cruising scene, are more than enough to paper over a few cracks.

d/sc Alain Guiraudie p Sylvia Pialat ph Claire Mathon ed Jean-Christophe Hym ad Roy Genty, François-Renaud Labarthe, Laurentt Lunetta cast Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d'Assumçao, Jérôme Chappatte, Mathieu Vervisch, Gilbert Traina, Emmanuel Daumas, Alain Giraudie
(2013, Fr, 100m)