Our new writer Brian Formo is reporting from the American Film Institute Film Festival with in-depth reviews of the erotic thriller Stranger By the Lake, the homage to the Giallo genre The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s family drama Like Father, Like Son, which already won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
Check out these three reviews and keep coming back for more coverage of AFI 2013!
Stranger By the Lake
“Pornography” isn’t the word that should be tagged with Stranger By the Lake. In fact, it’s kind of laughable that it is and mostly just speaks to people being afraid of the sight of a penis.
There are lots of penises on display in this casual French noir, indeed twice you see one erect. For those who need the blow by blow, you see the erections, briefly, once inside another man’s mouth and once, (again briefly), ejaculating. In fact these “pornographic” shots are the quickest cuts in the film. But let’s take a few steps back in the preceding sentence. The word that would more aptly describe Stranger By the Lake is “casual.”
Men lay about naked at a remote lake. The camera doesn’t leer. It’s there. Casually men walk up and have a casual conversation. They then go into the bushes for some casual sex. Casually, there always seems to be a man walking around with his hand down his pants looking for someone that will allow him to watch. He approaches them slowly, harmlessly and without a predator’s cloak. What’s the word? Ah yes, casually.
With all these naked men lying in the sun, looking for a fuck or a swim, only Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) and Michel (Christophe Paou) seem to be getting off. Maybe that’s because Franck witnessed his bronzed Mercury drown his former lover. Maybe that turned him on.
Franck was less turned on by his encounters previous to Michel, including a man who insisted on a condom. “I trust you,” Franck tells the man, who tells him that they don’t know each other. How can he trust someone he doesn’t know? In an odd way, witnessing Michel, the object of his affection, kill another man makes him know him. He knows what he’s capable of. Michel doesn’t play it safe. If you know your new lover is a killer, unprotected sex is the least of your concerns.
While Franck waits for Michel, he converses with a self-professed straight man, Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who is single, no longer interested in sex, likes simple conversation and seems to have a death wish. They talk but Stranger By the Lake doesn’t explain why Franck pursues Michel after the drowning. That’s not a fault to the film. Characters speak of grabbing a drink or getting dinner, but we never leave the lake.
In this way, director Alain Guiraudie has constructed a cabin fever type of film. There are cruising rules: don’t look at a couple, only tempt those who are alone, thus those who are alone are only the ones who are appealing. If Michel kills another man, does it not just mean that he’s now alone and available? We have to accept that in this film because there is no other world shown than the daylight hours at the beach. The inspector (Jérôme Chappatte) that ventures into this world is comically obtuse and separate — like an art professor squinting at a gallery showing Tom of Finland.
With its casual camera, simple story, unshaded areas of explaining desire, Stranger By the Lake is Knife in the Water without the woman to fight over. Stranger doesn’t dance about the dangling manhood, though. It shows it. Engorged, enraptured, enraged.
