Oh, what it must have been like at Cannes last year! First, Blue Is the Warmest Color — a three-hour, sexually-explicit lesbian romance — won the coveted Palme d’Or, then Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake takes the Queer Palm and the best director trophy in the Un Certain Regard competition (it later scored eight Cesar nominations — the French Oscar). But this film ramps up where Blue left off, shifting focus from lesbians to gay men.
Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a promiscuous gay man who frequents the cruisy nude beach in a remote part of France. Franck lusts after Michel (Christophe Paou), a ruggedly handsome, slightly mysterious and profoundly slutty tomcat, even though Michel doesn’t seem to take much specific interest in him. When he witnesses Michel apparently murdering his boyfriend, however, the two become entangled in a passionate affair as the local gendarme pursues them as possible suspects.
If this sounds like a bad “erotic thriller” — the kind Blockbuster used to trot out on their direct-to-video wall back in the day — it’s not … or rather, it’s more along the lines of the art-house films we saw in the heyday of queer cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s: One where sexual frankness is embraced, but so is a seriousness about filmmaking and exploring the human condition.
Guiraurdie pulls no punches: There’s not just simulated sex in the woods, there’s actual sex, with ejaculation, penetration, fellatio, all shown. And yet, as titillating as it can be, Stranger by the Lake, like John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (and, for that matter, Blue Is the Warmest Color) does not cross the line into outright pornography. Guiraurdie instead is exploring the nature of obsession, and how high-risk sexual practices (no condoms) and dating someone you know to be a murderer are part and parcel the same thing. Franck and Michel are as cavalier about contracting (or spreading) HIV as they are getting caught — or killed.
Newcomer Deladonchamps and Paou deserve props for the ballsiness to tackle such provocate stuff with their clothes mostly off, but in many ways, Guiraurdie is the star here. His camera lingers on scenes for excruciatingly long and realistic shots: Of cruising the tall grasses near the shore, of awkward conversations, of a drowning shown in one lengthy, continuous long shot that is both unnerving and deceptive (have we really seen what we think we’ve seen?). He uses the silences, and the sounds of the lake, as the musical score, creating a hypnotic tone that lulls you into a sense of foreboding while rarely giving you anything to actually grab onto as disturbing.
Stranger by the Lake is certainly not for all tastes — don’t bring your mother — but it does conjure a dreamy world that becomes a nightmare.
— A.W.J.
Three-and-a-half stars. Now playing at the Angelika Mockingbird Station.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition March 21, 2014.