This is an unnerving psychological thriller which takes place entirely in an idyllic lakeside cruising ground.
Its characters seem almost unmoored from society – we have almost no idea of how they live the rest of their lives – and so the cruising ground comes to represent a sort of alternative society. But one that finds itself in danger when one of the men is found drowned, perhaps murdered.
Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) spends days at the lake, sunbathing, talking to friends, having sex. He soon becomes fixated with the coldly handsome Michel (Christophe Paou) whist also striking up a tentative friendship with a middle-aged man Henri (Patrick D’Assumçao). HenrI, who is the most fully realised character in the film, isn’t there for sex, but to stave off a loneliness which is evidently consuming him.
Alain Guiraudie, the film’s writer and director, seems to be advancing a thesis, but one that’s either deliberately ambiguous or perhaps just hard to fathom. A spoiler ahead, but it’s impossible to discuss the film without revealing one major plot point (although one revealed within the first 20 minutes). The movie depends on one character covering up a murder he has witnessed. This would be comprehensible if the crime had been committed by, say, a long-term partner. But Franck doesn’t tell anyone of what he saw simply because he has the hots for Michel. Which makes him complicit in the crime, and also partly responsible for further murders. As we don’t know Michel’s motives (is he mad or bad?) this, to me at least, makes Franck the real villain of the piece. A gay man who will willingly risk the lives of others to satisfy a sexual urge. The film seems too sophisticated to simply be saying that some gay men have so little regard for members of their community they’ll put them in mortal danger for a quick fuck (HIV+ men who don’t use condoms are morally wrong), however this could be a valid reading of the film.
The movie is also, at some level, a response to William Friedkin‘s Cruising. It has the same basic premise; and I feel one character’s anachronistic moustache and big hair points to an idea of something that originated in the late ’70s – but whether the killer represents Aids itself, or merely a character that seems to have wandered in off the set of Cruising – it’s hard to tell. The film has a fashionable non-ending which will certainly annoy some – but then a neat wrapping-up would have destroyed its ambiguous, enigmatic feel.
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Stranger by the lake: Duke at Komedia: Film Review
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