REVIEW - STRANGER BY THE LAKE

In dappled hues of azure blue and soothing, leafy green and dazzling gold, the rippled abs of the naked male lapping up the rippled waves of the lake, slick, enveloping, still water, the unknown beneath its surface, l'inconnu du lac. This lake radiates desire as it reflects the dazzling sunlight, desire for friendship, desire for sex, desire for blood. Desire for power, perhaps, or for knowledge, for understanding, for acceptance. Even a perverted desire for love. All desires denied these men by the world beyond this hermetic lake, never glimpsed - the desires they carry with them they can barely admit to, not verbally, and they seem bizarre, mystical, aberrant in this topsy-turvy paradise, where openness takes on a very different form than in the outer world. Honesty is indeed not even unexpected but faintly, implicitly forbidden. Nudity, on the other hand, is quite expected. It is also quite prolific in Alain Guiraudie's film. He eschews cinematic trickery in favour of a refreshing focus on natural beauty - be it the moonlight on the lake, the wind brushing through the trees, or the carnal beauty of caramel skin, chiselled features, and an intense shock of thick ejaculate. As a noir in the blinding daylight, it's a sensuous, sublime tour into an idealised world, not perfect but perfectly desirable, and perfectly disquieting. And when these men, each desperate in their own way, desperate to maintain control over one another, and a life they don't even half-understand, drop their guard, with the thrill of exposing themselves with full frankness, at last, this noir becomes a troubling study of loneliness, and of the inadequacy of those aesthetic pleasures, which this film is so rich in. Emotional pleasures are sought here most of all; they are constantly at stake, yet so rarely on offer.