A Little Death: Stranger By The Lake (2013)

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Dir. Alain Guiraudie

Cars are left side-by-side to each other at a dead end of a country road, an improvised car park. This image repeats in Stranger By The Lake, set over consecutive days. Repetition, similar actions and events happening but with more and more complication. It's summer and Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) goes to a beach each day, a gay cruising spot where men can sunbathe, swim, interact, or go into the woods to have sex with any of the other patrons. The film begins at first as an erotic, naturalistic drama, as Franck is unable to find a romance or even a brief sexual fling each day there. Instead he develops a friendship with Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), a older male who sits on the other side of the beach by himself and never goes swimming or cruising. Very static shots make up the film. No music. In the throes of summer, the beach and surrounding woodland is beautiful and cut off from the rest of the world. A vast sea is shot in the brightest blue and you could get lost within the surrounding woods.

Naked men lay on the beach, explicit full frontal nudity, completely casual, in a way that makes the taboos of male nudity a complete farce. At tines these men look like deities on holiday. The sex is explicit and real, even if body doubles were used. It actually amused me to see a film with real acts of sex on a cinema screen. In fact this is the first film with hardcore sex I've seen at the cinema. As the nearest multiplex is in another city to me, the nearest art cinema to have seen this further afield, to see such an explicit work on a giant cinema screen than on DVD for once is a vast difference. Only now writing this review do I also realise, usually as a solitary viewer, that I viewed such scenes of ejaculation and sex in the prescience of strangers I didn't know, all male young and old in the day time, and that I never gave consideration to the sex itself as I left my seat to the in-cinema cafe but to the unsolved thoughts of what the film was altogether. I feel hesitant talking about sex with even my parents, yet complete strangers did not bother me with this film, too enraptured by said film and more concerned my head was blocking the screen for the person behind me. Having actually seen a film now, at a cinema, with hardcore sex that was available to see for a wide audience, even in an "alternative" cinema, now makes the fear I had in viewing any real sex, hetereo gay bi etc., completely stupid by how it never registered to me in the viewing as I was more concerned for the characters and what the director was intending to do. It also makes the fact, especailly in Britain, we're still debating this issue within cinema just as farcical. After this film ended, I walked out, passing a glance with the only other person who stayed until the end credits finished, and the only thing on my mind was wrangling the moods I felt for the film, not necessarily these hardcore images by themselves. The scenes themselves have a real, alluring eroticism that even for a heterosexual viewer like myself can feel, unbelievably passionate when experiencing viewing the film. Brilliantly though, even as Thanatos and Eros start to intermingle, the director Alain Guiraudie also has the down-to-earth and absurd also take place alongside the erotic. Condoms strewn on the woodland floor to the annoyance of someone about to make love to Franck, and a running gag of a chubby guy who likes to watch others have sex and masturbate nearby, sometimes to the bafflement of the party he's near. The fact that this man is fleshed out, character wise and literally, beyond being a gag into a loveable personality himself shows a rich dynamic to the eroticism and characterisation too that is rewarding. This is not just a misery fest like a lot of arthouse films with hardcore sex in them are stereotyped as, not helped by films including ones I admire that are this, nor neither is it flimsy hardcore. This for me feels like someone who actually cared about depicting sex in a way that even viewers like me who aren't gay can feel as much as a gay viewer could.

Part of the way through however, Franck views a heinous incident, falling in love with the mysterious but likely dangerous Michel (Christophe Paou). Their romance blossoms but as a police inspector (Jérôme Chappatte) enters the world of the beach, Franck's romance may be for the worst. Less a murder mystery than a psychological suspense drama based on one man's desire, Stranger By The Lake proves you can have a make version of the femme fatale, alluring yet dangerous. The difference is the figure of desire here is a very masculine, muscular and bearded male. There have been films where an average Joe/Jill falls in love with a very dangerous person; the director has said the film's an expedition into his own sexuality, but there is a universal aspect to the story too, the fear of potential danger and how as much it might be a draw to them, as they know how ill-advised their romance could be rather than naive about it. The inspector comments that only two to three days after the heinous incident, the patrons of the beach are acting as usual, as if nothing has happened, but the environment is a fragile one. Its cut off from everything, but it's not that far away from the rest of the world. Once, humorously, in a man wandering through wanting to meet "horny" women, but when a boat passes by its clear how thin the distance from the rest of the world actually is. Everything appears to be normal in the secluded beach too, but the murder does linger amongst the patrons at the back of their activities.

Until the end the film continues with an exceptionally engaging character drama with these characters that populate the beach. The film never leaves this location, the repetition of Franck arriving at the beach and regular faces met, including always saying hi and talking to Henri, giving the film a sense of lived-in reality, but also a rigorous structure to work around. If something strays from what is repeated before, that means something is very amiss. The erotic desires of Franck and Michel are palpable and legitimately sensual, but it's clear, especially through Paou's performance, Michel is someone "off" from everyone else. Regardless if his lovers were other men or women, there is something very amiss to him. I could be sticking my foot in my mouth, as a heterosexual male discussing a film by a gay filmmaker, but I question what critic Armond White said in that this film shows a retrogression in depicting gay men when it's a film set around a specific story with specific characters. Its beach world is incredibly normal, welcoming so, as well as sensual, the fears Guiraudie might be expressing clearly interpretable in the fact that the danger, wrapped around a potential thriller, is not linked to homosexuality itself but a concept that has existed in all the arts, and for any form of physical and emotional desire. The lover who you crave, love, but who could be harmful to you at the same time. This doesn't mean the fact that this is a gay filmmaker making a psychodramatic work around gay men should be ignored - if a film is specific, it should be allowed to. The problem is when its scrutinised under a perception outside of the individuality of films that oppresses the ability to gauge each film because a "respectable" portrait always has to be encouraged without a logical reason to. It doesn't need to do this and feels richer for this. Its greatest virtue is also being an immensely engaging, slow boiling hybrid of genre and drama. The ending, the last minutes, are not that of a Hitchcockian thriller, a blurb praise the film's been saddled with to sell it, but that of the central relationship and the theme within it. What was an abrupt one when I left the theatre screening room, realising this, becomes pitch perfect for the whole film when you consider this dark romance is the central plot.

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