Movie Review: ‘Stranger by the Lake’

“Stranger by the Lake” can be placed comfortably in opposition to last year’s Palme d’Or winner “Blue Is the Warmest Color.” While the latter found success in fitting lesbian lovers into a conventional romance, the former delights in the transgressive surrealism of its premise, taking cues from Hitchcock in its intertwining of love and death.

Alain Guiraudie, one of the most exciting directors today, seems to draw from his own experiences in sketching out the central plot. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a regular at a beach that serves as a gay cruising site, falls into a strange, chaste friendship with Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), a lonely, unloved man who inadvertently discovers the beach and refuses to admit any gay impulses.

Meanwhile, Michel (Christophe Paou), another regular whom Franck has had an eye on, makes a move on Franck. At first, this is a pleasant development, until the murky possibility that Michel may be a murderer gives the affair a tint of death.

“Stranger by the Lake” continues in the direction that Guiraudie’s 2009 “The King of Escape” signaled, dialing up the contrast between naturalistic aesthetic and insular community until a graceful surrealism emerges.

The cruising beach is one of the most fortuitous settings that Guiraudie has ever utilized, its glimmering shores flowing seamlessly into the dense, ominous forest where successful seductions are consummated. White sands upon which scores of men lay bare – the sunlight giving their bodies an effect not dissimilar to marble statues –and the titular lake, deep with metaphor, make up Guiraudie’s haunting vision of unstable paradise.

His style has always been deceptive – at first glance, his reliance on naturalistic camera movement and unaffected acting might peg him as a director focused on characters. Instead, his films tend to convey a surprising amount about the system enveloping his characters, mostly through a disorienting sense of location.

In “Stranger by the Lake,” Guiraudie’s tendency to keep space ambiguous allows thrilling elements to sneak into the film. As Michel’s danger becomes more apparent, the basic idea of where he might be becomes less apparent. This is a classic horror movie tactic, keeping the audience guessing about who’s going to die and when. But Guiraudie elevates it to existential dread –death in this movie feels more symbolic than final.

This surprising unity of philosophy and genre has a large part to do with the film’s interest in the conflict between the desire to live and the desire to love. There is very little ambiguity to the central act of violence; in fact, it is Franck himself who knows the danger of the situation most clearly. Yet we get the sense that he is willing to give up almost anything for this inescapable attraction, so the surprising conclusion that the film’s limitless confusions draw is that, for a certain kind of person, loneliness might be worse than death.

The beach as a microcosm inherently contains this premise – the legality of using it as a cruising site is murky, to say the least, and although the film emphasizes the mundane qualities of the meeting place, there remains substantial risk for all the men looking for momentary pleasure. The aim of “Stranger by the Lake,” then, is to make an implicit threat explicit, to push the boundary of how much one is willing to give up for love. And it’s at the edge of those boundaries that it is most exciting, most terrifying and transgressive enough that it’s almost romantic. And deadly.