Stranger by the Lake
L'inconnu du lac

The work of French writer/director Alain Guiraudie hasn't been well known in the States up to now, but this picture was a big hit at the Cannes Film Festival and should bring him a good deal of attention. The movie is a kind of art-house hybrid: part gay erotic thriller and part existential tone poem about love, loneliness, risk, connection, and death. The action is effectively contained in a single location, on the edge of a lake where gay men sunbathe nude and cruise each other in the woods nearby. The film has been acclaimed for its Hitchcockian overtones, but its austere, naturalistic creepiness is far more reminiscent of Michael Haneke, or an early Roman Polanski picture (with a whole lot more male nudity and explicit gay sex).

Stranger by the Lake moves slowly, and its minimal narrative sneaks up on you. But since it can be taken in so many ways (a straight-up cautionary tale about promiscuity; a metaphor for the internal struggle between emotional desire and rational logic; an exploration and destruction of a genre), it is never boring to watch. Visually stunning, with its combination of the French countryside's soft light, the lake's relaxed ripples, and naked, attractively equipped bodies lying on the sand, the picture draws us in and holds us effortlessly. This is a rare, graphically sexual gay movie whose voyeuristic titillation works equally well on both queer and straight audiences, which is important because there are key points where we must be able to understand why the main character takes certain actions and chooses to ignore certain events. Guiraudie pulls this all off quite well.