Stranger by the Lake

There are cer­tain secret areas of the human anato­my – male and female – that sel­dom, if ever, make an appear­ance in main­stream cin­e­ma. Let’s call it the worm’s eye view, look­ing direct­ly upwards from the ground from a van­tage point that’s equidis­tant between the two feet. The rea­son that the cam­era is rarely placed at this some­what awk­ward, voyeuris­tic angle is because it’s too far removed from relat­able human expe­ri­ence – we don’t view the world upwards, look­ing at the either the ceil­ing, the emp­ty sky or dan­gling gen­i­talia. Thank­ful­ly, French direc­tor Alain Guiraudie has care­ful­ly altered the dimen­sions of this anti-shot so we can expe­ri­ence its fleshy plea­sures from a per­spec­tive that remains naturalistic.

And so Stranger by the Lake boasts the odd dis­tinc­tion of allow­ing view­ers to bask in full-frontal nudi­ty from new and unchar­tered angles. While this all might trans­late as mere feisty, cen­sor-bait­ing provo­ca­tion, it should be said that Guiraudie exe­cutes these shots with a cav­a­lier non­cha­lance last redo­lent of Jack Smith’s sem­i­nal 1963 short, Flam­ing Crea­tures. His actors aren’t dis­tin­guished by their faces, but the pri­mal, upside-down fea­tures that are formed by a flac­cid penis lay­ing on top of a pair of testicles.

The film opens with our hero, Franck (Pierre Deladon­champs), can­ter­ing from a qui­et carpark, through a wood­land glade and onto a lake­side nud­ist beach – there­by intro­duc­ing the film’s three sole loca­tions. He then pro­ceeds to take his clothes off and lay down, peek­ing length­ways up the water­line for men he could accom­pa­ny into the bush­es. One morn­ing he spies Hen­ri (Patrick d’Assumçao) sat all alone off to the West and ful­ly clothed. The pair begin to talk and strike up an easy, non-sex­u­al rap­port. His rea­sons for being present on the beach remain obscure, though it enables him to observe the roman­tic actions of his denud­ed co-bathers.

This is a strange and bril­liant film, one that man­ages to tran­scend the iron­i­cal­ly extreme pre­sen­ta­tion of its cen­tral dra­ma to exist as a stripped-back, Hitch­cock­ian fable about the unten­able vicis­si­tudes of human desire. ​“The medi­a­tor between head and hands must be the heart!” said Fritz Lang in Metrop­o­lis, but Guiraudie has for­mu­lat­ed a set-up where no sin­gle char­ac­ter pos­sess­es all three of these essen­tial human traits. Inef­fec­tu­al Hen­ri has heart and head. Dole­ful Franck has heart and hands. And then there’s the preda­to­ry Michel (Christophe Paou), the mous­ta­chioed antag­o­nist who has head and hands – which he uses for sex, but also for murder.

Stranger by the Lake, a dead­pan erot­ic fable, defies easy genre cat­e­gori­sa­tion at every turn, com­bin­ing the best of every­thing (com­e­dy, hor­ror, erot­ic thriller) rather than attempt­ing to plough its own eccen­tric fur­row. Guiraudie shoots in gor­geous wide frames, pre­sent­ing this beach as a sun­ny idyll that’s been taint­ed by the spec­tre of death and the grub­by thrill of sex in the bush­es. It talks direct­ly about the sex­u­al appetites of the gay com­mu­ni­ty, but its over­ar­ch­ing themes touch on icky uni­ver­sal truths.