Stranger by the Lake (2013)
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
Frank spends his summer days hopelessly searching for companionship at a popular cruising spot on the shores of a lake in rural France. One day, he meets Michel, an attractive yet darkly mysterious man and falls blindly in love.
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What critics compared Stranger by the Lake to
Franck is clearly aware of this, but so caught up in his passion for Michel that he’s willing to keep up appearances, until the story shifts to a thriller-like denouement which, with its knife-wielding finale, is strangely reminiscent of William Friedkin’s Cruising—another movie about gay decadence and serial killers, albeit one with a different agenda.
His vision doesn’t have the latex, whips, and frantic dance moves we remember from Friedkin’s Cruising, but there’s still an ever-present sense of danger, and the while the film brims with erotic tension it’s rarely erotic itself.
By immersing us so totally in the workings of the gay beach, Guiraudie avoided the trap of William Friedkin's abysmal " Cruising ", which presented its milieu as a freak show.
Plenty of gay-themed films have included murder as a plot point; William Friedkin’s loathsome Cruising made an early-AIDS-era spectacle of the small divide separating loving and life-ending penetration.
The movie is voyeuristic, sure, but in a way that evokes Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window more than William Friedkin's Cruising.
This French psychological thriller is both the opposite of “Cruising” (1980) and the movie “Cruising” wanted to be.
Lee slits his throat at climax under the cover of moonlight in the middle of a cornfield, as evocative of “Stranger by the Lake,” or indeed “Cruising,” as anything before or after “Knife + Heart.”
The camera work by Claire Mathon (“ Stranger by the Lake” ) is captivating in every light, room and location.
But if in Stranger by the Lake the desire to pull toward death and annihilation could be dismissed as some kind of gay exclusivity, and the risky sexual encounters/assaults of the woman in Leap Year could be comprehended as products of her own invitation, Elle makes it impossible to protect ourselves from the inconvenient truths of desire.