In French Writer/Director Alain Guiraudie’s last film, The King of Escape from 2009, a gay man falls in love with a teenage girl. In his new, atmospheric thriller, The Stranger by the Lake, a handsome and personable, but lonely man in his late 20s named Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) falls in love with Michel (Christophe Paou), a dashing but secretive older playboy.
The explicit sex and nudity is occasionally gratuitous; but Guidaudie uses it, as he does the idyllic setting of an enticingly beautiful lake, to create a milieu where desire flirts with danger as Franck continually puts himself in harms way.
Franck arrives one hot summer day at an isolated lake hoping not only to swim, but to fall in love. He has been to the lake before, but not for a while. If he doesn’t know, he quickly learns that the sandy shore is the place to display your assets, and the thick woods behind is the place to pair off with a new or regular conquest.
The most approachable man is hardly the most likely lover. Henri (Patrick D’Assumcao) is overweight, unattractive, considerably older than Franck, a non-swimmer, and, if he is to be believed, straight. He is apparently at the lake on holiday but he does nothing all day, but stare at the water. Henri warns Franck that there are large silures in the lake, that have been known to attack swimmers.
Silures, however are not the most dangerous predators in the lake. Franck’s competent swimming is noticed by Michel, a tall, fit, swimmer, with an attention-grabbing moustache and matinee-idol good looks. Franck is smitten, but Michel, fully aware of Franck’s gaze, goes off into the woods with a quarrelsome man who appears to be his partner.
Franck pairs up with the next best thing he can find, but the man refuses to have unprotected sex – something that doesn’t seem to bother Franck – and they go their separate ways. Franck is still thinking of Michel when, late that afternoon, he sees him in the lake, apparently drowning his partner. Far from being put off, Franck is drawn toward the suspected murderer.
Guiraudie’s style and the setting is as important in the film as is the interaction between his characters. The men dotted around the shore and wading in the water stand silent and still like models posing for a Seurat painting, and the lighting resembles that of the sublime pointillist. When Franck takes his first swim, you feel the cool, refreshing water and want to jump in. Seldom has a lake appeared so clear and untouched, unlike the men in the film.
Guiraudie’s influences must surely include Eric Rohmer, for the stylised naturalism and the use of nature as a setting, and Alfred Hitchcock, for the suspense and the wonderful police inspector played by Jerome Chappatte. But despite these and other influences, Stranger by the Lake, the filmmaker’s fourth feature, is striking and distinctive.
Guiraudie, for instance, slyly refers to a stranger (or literally, an ‘unknown’) in the title but leaves the identity of this unknown ambiguous. At first we assume the ‘inconnu’ is Franck, as he enters the milieu as a novice and newcomer. Then our attention switches to Henri who sits apart, fully dressed and allegedly straight, but whose actions somewhat contradict his story. And then there’s the secretive, manipulative Michel who refuses to extend his relationship with Franck outside of their trysts at the lake.
Stranger by the Lake, with its explicit sex scenes and male nudity, should not be dismissed as ‘gay cinema’, but enjoyed as an involving, taut thriller whose haunting ending might be more abrupt than you would wish.
