Stranger by the Lake

11/05/2024

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   Lovers are often complicit. But so are characters in a Hitchcock film, whether love is involved or not. They are frequently complicit in murder, and two French filmmakers who would surely have influenced Alain Guiraudie, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, have talked about Hitchcock’s interest in transference of guilt. It rests on one character realising another character is guilty of a crime and their silence leads them to be implicated. James Quandt in his review of the film invokes both Rohmer and Chabrol, and also discusses guilt transferred. In Hitchcock, It is a theme developed in Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Strangers on a Train. There will be different reasons for this complicity, and Chabrol also mastered it as a theme. It might last for a brief moment or a length of time and can be based on adoration or blackmail. In Stranger by the Lake, Guiraudie bases it chiefly on love and desire and it lasts for several days.

     `The film’s setting is minimal, its timespan clear; taking place over ten days at the Lake of Saint Croix in Province. The side of the lake the film focuses upon is a cruising spot, with the film detailing various assignations amongst the habitues. (The more explicit moments involve body doubles.) These scenes may seem as deliberate as the film’s formal procedures, with the film usually introducing each day with a high-angled shot on the car park and works with a small group of characters who turn up each morning or afternoon to turn each other on. The film can seem as ritualistic as a samurai movie, and no less coded. The gay community's main object of desire, Michel (Christophe Paou), is in the midst of what seems like an assignation, and asks a voyeur, who has the habit of masturbating when Michel is having sex, to refrain for the moment. Michel is having a conflab in the bushes with our central character Franck ((Pierre Deladonchamps), and asks if the onanist would be kind enough to come back later when they are screwing. Rules are rules. Later, Michel  chastises Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who has been building a friendship with Franck, for keeping his clothes on. Henri is someone “who is never naked, who is never cruising, who doesn’t swim.” He is a fish out of water who won’t get into the sea. Yet Henri seems to possess values Franck is drawn towards as readily as he is attracted to Michel’s body. The rules might be predicated on sexual desire, but there are other pleasures to be accessed even if Michel might not be inclined to approve of them. 

    Michel goes on to kill Henri and in another film we might make much of the guilt Franck would no doubt feel: if he had reported Michel to the police after the first murder, which he witnesses, his friend wouldn’t have needed to die, and instead there he is trying to staunch Henri’s slit throat with his T-shirt. But Henri proposes he wants to die, saying “I had what I was after.” If Guiraudie draws on the transference of guilt, he is interested more than Hitchcock in perversity and desire than guilty feeling.

  This perversity of course has nothing to do with the film’s gay theme. In a period of two or three years cinema gave us Blue is the Warmest Colour, In Bloom, Keep the Lights On, Tom at the Farm, Appropriate Behaviour, Pasolini, Foxcatcher, Carol, The Imitation Game and plenty others, yet while Stranger by the Lake may be the most sexually explicit, its psychology is very implicit indeed as we may wonder why Henri is so willing to let Michel kill him and why Franck doesn’t initially report Michel to the police. The easy answer to each is that Franck is falling in love with him, and that Henri has no one to love after a recent break-up. But the more difficult one rests on a much more ostensibly trivial response: that Franck is curious about Michel’s character, about what motivates him and wishes to find out on his own terms. As for Henri, perhaps he was looking to end his life and finds someone humanly indifferent enough to do the deed. Michel might think he is murdering a man (which he is) but he may also be assisting a suicide. Henri’s motives, however, are secondary to Franck’s, as though Franck sees Michel as a curiosity more than a murderer, and while the detective investigating wants to find out who is responsible for the drowned man, Franck already knows that. His interest lies elsewhere, but not only in the sexual. 

    In Blue Velvet, the central character’s girlfriend says, “I don’t know if you are a detective or a pervert”, as the amateur sleuth will soon find himself watching a woman undressing while he hides in her closet. It is a line many a detective film might skirt around, and certainly Hitchcock’s Vertigo is as good an example as any. In Stranger by the Lake, Guiraudie doesn’t only leave Franck in an ambiguous position between curiosity and perversity, he also like any good transference-of-guilt filmmaker wants to implicate the viewer as well. When Michel drowns the other man, we watch it from a great distance, and while the viewer might wish for a closer look at what is happening as the director films it in dusk light, we are watching it from Franck’s point of view, standing up on a hill behind some trees. By holding to his perspective on events, we can’t get any closer. If we did, so would Franck, and Franck might be observed observing. Yet we do get a medium shot of Michel as he comes out of the water and starts to dress. The film hasn’t cut and Franck hasn’t moved, but now Michel is very close indeed, and most people would be disinclined to confront a murderer at night in an isolated spot. 

    But most people wouldn’t be likely a couple of days later to start having sex with the man they’ve witnessed killing someone else, yet Franck starts seeing Michel, a term that doesn’t mean anything more than they will be priority beach buddies as Michel insists he will go home alone each night. No doubt Franck is fascinated by Michel but, while his murderousness adds to Michel’s mystery, it hardly lends itself well to intimacy as there seems little beyond the sexual in Franck and Michel’s encounters, even if sexual desire can’t quite explain Franck’s attraction to a man who could readily kill him. It is to Henri that Franck goes for meaningful conversation, a point Michel notices and that leads to an odd form of jealousy. Yet Michel isn’t wrong to see that the bond between Franck and Henri is deeper than that between Franck and Michel as the film offers an intricate exploration of complicity in various manifestations. 

     Complicity can be negative or positive. If, as we have noted, one often has complicity with a lover, sometimes with a friend, Hitchcock more than most turned it into a negative, while many a noir or Patricia Highsmith novel would do likewise. (Hitchcock of course adapted Highsmith with Strangers on a Train). Guiraudie proposes that the encounters at the lake are themselves complicit: that like-minded people wile away their free time looking for sexual assignations and all one has to do is move towards the bushes for someone else to understand this as an invite. However, for Michel, Henri is a double affront. He sits at the beach often looking out at the sea, keeps his shorts on and only goes into the forest near the end when Michel kills him. He doesn’t abide by the codes and this might be why Franck keeps returning to sit next to him as they speak about each other’s lives. 

  In this sense, Franck has positive complicity with Henri; negative complicity with Michel, yet the film also insists on the cool, aesthetic appeal of Michel, against Henri’s ageing plainness. Before the chat between Henri and Michel, the film cuts between Henri waddling in Michel's direction and cuts to Michel looking over at Henri, shot in closeup and looking like a movie star. Henri seems like a dishevelled extra. When we see them in a two shot, Michel is seated, bronzed and relaxed; Henri in profile, his belly protruding and hanging over his shorts. Henri is not much to look at but he is someone to talk to and if Michel is a curiosity to Franck, Henri clearly intrigues Michel. “What are you really looking for?” Michel asks Henri, and it’s as if here we have two men at opposite ends of the complicity spectrum. Michel appears to see that old pair Eros and Thanatos closely linked: that desire and death are opposites that attract and that he represents their apotheosis. For Henri, what matters it seems is friendship. When Franck wonders why he is on the gay side of the beach, he insists he isn’t looking for sexual encounters, but he is looking for encounters. “On the other side if I started talking to people they would think I am crazy.” Here, he can talk to people because everybody seems to be more or less alone, even if that initial gambit happens to be based on sexual assumption. 

     Philosopher Michel Foucault wondered provocatively if homosexuality became prominently disapproved of in the 18th and 19th Centuries because male friendships became uncommon. Foucault claims that as “long as friendship was something important, was socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together….once friendship disappeared as a socially accepted notion” then this question began to be asked. Friendship, which for centuries after antiquity “was a very important social relation within which people had a certain freedom…in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see these kinds of friendships disappearing.” ('Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’) What we can extract from Foucault’s claim in the context of Stranger by the Lake is this: for all the sexual explicitness, for all the freedoms the characters can practice in the contemporary world, friendships seem the anomaly, the very thing that for centuries would be so fundamental it could contain within its parameters gay relationships that needn’t be of much concern for society or state.  

      In a very different way, they needn’t concern us any more either but for very different reasons, where the pink pound and personal mobility have left gay lives often wealthier and freer than heterosexual ones: the nuclear family became no longer necessarily the capitalist ideal. “I made this film in the image of sexual liberation as I experienced it”, Guiraudie says, “which was something I thought of as highly emancipatory and which has finally come to mean that whoever doesn’t orgasm today is the ultimate loser.” (Bomb) Seeking friendship over sexual desire, possessing a body that needn’t cause any problem for friendship but might be deemed a consumer liability, leaves Henri a certain type of loser. How can Guiraudie regard gay liberation as something worth celebrating a priori when a homosexual environment can seem like any other community, indifferent and selfish? As the inspector says, “You have a strange way of loving each other. One of yours gets murdered and you keep fucking.” 

   That is bad enough but Franck goes further in knowing who the killer is and has sex with him. By the end of the film the inspector is dead, so is Henri, and we have witnessed different modes of complicity. The transference of guilt has led Franck to be not only complicit in Henri’s murder. He is also potentially fearful over his own death as he still appears to desire Michel, and aware of the lost complicity with his friend who is now no more. But as Michel calls out after him; telling Franck that he needs him, Franck continues to hide in the bush. Then, a minute later, with the light so dark we can hardly make Franck out in the forest, he calls out Michel’s name. Is he doing so hoping that he has gone, and can escape free, or is it a beseeching request, hoping that Michel is still there? It seems more the latter than the former and, if so, is Franck willing to sacrifice not just the lives of others but his own life to a desire he cannot resist? In Hitchcock, the characters colluding initially in another’s crimes either through blackmail, loyalty or naivety, realise what matters most, and it isn’t protecting another person’s criminality. In Stranger by the Lake, that question remains moot. “I wanted to make a film coloured by homosexuality", Guiraudie said in the press notes, one, "that could become a metaphor of society, desire, and humanity in general.” That question is partly about what constitutes a community, and whether a coded, simultaneously furtive and exhibitionistic sexually oriented culture can pass for one.  

    This is a question of a greater moral murkiness but is also evident in a form that isn’t afraid to use, like Hitchcock, point-of-view shots at key moments. However, it also resists many elements that the maestro would regard as essential. The film had no non-diegetic music; it also plays up formal repetition over insistent variety. We keep returning to the establishing shot at the car park as the film moves from one day to the next, and Guiraudie insisted on natural light throughout. “We decided to stick to four states of available light: early afternoon, late afternoon, mid-twilight, and late twilight.” (Bomb) Rather than moving towards the sort of set-piece drama Hitchcock mastered (North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much), and the moral certainties that the sequences served, the conclusion here is subdued and troublesome. It is ethically bemusing and visually crepuscular. By the very end, the available light is so low that we can barely distinguish Franck within it. The form meets well its content as we don’t know if Franck will live and wonder, if we can hardly see him, whether he will be able to distinguish Michel were he soon to attack. It is a narrative ambiguity to match its moral enquiry, and as the credits come up we might wonder how such an explicit film has arrived at such implicit complicity. We might wonder too if the complicity he had with Henri was finally less conformist than the more conventional, if deadly, desire he has for Michel.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Stranger by the Lake

Lovers are often complicit. But so are characters in a Hitchcock film, whether love is involved or not. They are frequently complicit in murder, and two French filmmakers who would surely have influenced Alain Guiraudie, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, have talked about Hitchcock's interest in transference of guilt. It rests on one character realising another character is guilty of a crime and their silence leads them to be implicated. James Quandt in his review of the film invokes both Rohmer and Chabrol, and also discusses guilt transferred. In Hitchcock, It is a theme developed in Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Strangers on a Train. There will be different reasons for this complicity, and Chabrol also mastered it as a theme. It might last for a brief moment or a length of time and can be based on adoration or blackmail. In Stranger by the Lake, Guiraudie bases it chiefly on love and desire and it lasts for several days.

`The film's setting is minimal, its timespan clear; taking place over ten days at the Lake of Saint Croix in Province. The side of the lake the film focuses upon is a cruising spot, with the film detailing various assignations amongst the habitues. (The more explicit moments involve body doubles.) These scenes may seem as deliberate as the film's formal procedures, with the film usually introducing each day with a high-angled shot on the car park and works with a small group of characters who turn up each morning or afternoon to turn each other on. The film can seem as ritualistic as a samurai movie, and no less coded. The gay community's main object of desire, Michel (Christophe Paou), is in the midst of what seems like an assignation, and asks a voyeur, who has the habit of masturbating when Michel is having sex, to refrain for the moment. Michel is having a conflab in the bushes with our central character Franck ((Pierre Deladonchamps), and asks if the onanist would be kind enough to come back later when they are screwing. Rules are rules. Later, Michel chastises Henri (Patrick d'Assumao), who has been building a friendship with Franck, for keeping his clothes on. Henri is someone "who is never naked, who is never cruising, who doesn't swim." He is a fish out of water who won't get into the sea. Yet Henri seems to possess values Franck is drawn towards as readily as he is attracted to Michel's body. The rules might be predicated on sexual desire, but there are other pleasures to be accessed even if Michel might not be inclined to approve of them.

Michel goes on to kill Henri and in another film we might make much of the guilt Franck would no doubt feel: if he had reported Michel to the police after the first murder, which he witnesses, his friend wouldn't have needed to die, and instead there he is trying to staunch Henri's slit throat with his T-shirt. But Henri proposes he wants to die, saying "I had what I was after." If Guiraudie draws on the transference of guilt, he is interested more than Hitchcock in perversity and desire than guilty feeling.

This perversity of course has nothing to do with the film's gay theme. In a period of two or three years cinema gave us Blue is the Warmest Colour, In Bloom, Keep the Lights On, Tom at the Farm, Appropriate Behaviour, Pasolini, Foxcatcher, Carol, The Imitation Game and plenty others, yet while Stranger by the Lake may be the most sexually explicit, its psychology is very implicit indeed as we may wonder why Henri is so willing to let Michel kill him and why Franck doesn't initially report Michel to the police. The easy answer to each is that Franck is falling in love with him, and that Henri has no one to love after a recent break-up. But the more difficult one rests on a much more ostensibly trivial response: that Franck is curious about Michel's character, about what motivates him and wishes to find out on his own terms. As for Henri, perhaps he was looking to end his life and finds someone humanly indifferent enough to do the deed. Michel might think he is murdering a man (which he is) but he may also be assisting a suicide. Henri's motives, however, are secondary to Franck's, as though Franck sees Michel as a curiosity more than a murderer, and while the detective investigating wants to find out who is responsible for the drowned man, Franck already knows that. His interest lies elsewhere, but not only in the sexual.

In Blue Velvet, the central character's girlfriend says, "I don't know if you are a detective or a pervert", as the amateur sleuth will soon find himself watching a woman undressing while he hides in her closet. It is a line many a detective film might skirt around, and certainly Hitchcock's Vertigo is as good an example as any. In Stranger by the Lake, Guiraudie doesn't only leave Franck in an ambiguous position between curiosity and perversity, he also like any good transference-of-guilt filmmaker wants to implicate the viewer as well. When Michel drowns the other man, we watch it from a great distance, and while the viewer might wish for a closer look at what is happening as the director films it in dusk light, we are watching it from Franck's point of view, standing up on a hill behind some trees. By holding to his perspective on events, we can't get any closer. If we did, so would Franck, and Franck might be observed observing. Yet we do get a medium shot of Michel as he comes out of the water and starts to dress. The film hasn't cut and Franck hasn't moved, but now Michel is very close indeed, and most people would be disinclined to confront a murderer at night in an isolated spot.

But most people wouldn't be likely a couple of days later to start having sex with the man they've witnessed killing someone else, yet Franck starts seeing Michel, a term that doesn't mean anything more than they will be priority beach buddies as Michel insists he will go home alone each night. No doubt Franck is fascinated by Michel but, while his murderousness adds to Michel's mystery, it hardly lends itself well to intimacy as there seems little beyond the sexual in Franck and Michel's encounters, even if sexual desire can't quite explain Franck's attraction to a man who could readily kill him. It is to Henri that Franck goes for meaningful conversation, a point Michel notices and that leads to an odd form of jealousy. Yet Michel isn't wrong to see that the bond between Franck and Henri is deeper than that between Franck and Michel as the film offers an intricate exploration of complicity in various manifestations.

Complicity can be negative or positive. If, as we have noted, one often has complicity with a lover, sometimes with a friend, Hitchcock more than most turned it into a negative, while many a noir or Patricia Highsmith novel would do likewise. (Hitchcock of course adapted Highsmith with Strangers on a Train). Guiraudie proposes that the encounters at the lake are themselves complicit: that like-minded people wile away their free time looking for sexual assignations and all one has to do is move towards the bushes for someone else to understand this as an invite. However, for Michel, Henri is a double affront. He sits at the beach often looking out at the sea, keeps his shorts on and only goes into the forest near the end when Michel kills him. He doesn't abide by the codes and this might be why Franck keeps returning to sit next to him as they speak about each other's lives.

In this sense, Franck has positive complicity with Henri; negative complicity with Michel, yet the film also insists on the cool, aesthetic appeal of Michel, against Henri's ageing plainness. Before the chat between Henri and Michel, the film cuts between Henri waddling in Michel's direction and cuts to Michel looking over at Henri, shot in closeup and looking like a movie star. Henri seems like a dishevelled extra. When we see them in a two shot, Michel is seated, bronzed and relaxed; Henri in profile, his belly protruding and hanging over his shorts. Henri is not much to look at but he is someone to talk to and if Michel is a curiosity to Franck, Henri clearly intrigues Michel. "What are you really looking for?" Michel asks Henri, and it's as if here we have two men at opposite ends of the complicity spectrum. Michel appears to see that old pair Eros and Thanatos closely linked: that desire and death are opposites that attract and that he represents their apotheosis. For Henri, what matters it seems is friendship. When Franck wonders why he is on the gay side of the beach, he insists he isn't looking for sexual encounters, but he is looking for encounters. "On the other side if I started talking to people they would think I am crazy." Here, he can talk to people because everybody seems to be more or less alone, even if that initial gambit happens to be based on sexual assumption.

Philosopher Michel Foucault wondered provocatively if homosexuality became prominently disapproved of in the 18th and 19th Centuries because male friendships became uncommon. Foucault claims that as "long as friendship was something important, was socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together....once friendship disappeared as a socially accepted notion" then this question began to be asked. Friendship, which for centuries after antiquity "was a very important social relation within which people had a certain freedom...in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see these kinds of friendships disappearing." ('Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity') What we can extract from Foucault's claim in the context of Stranger by the Lake is this: for all the sexual explicitness, for all the freedoms the characters can practice in the contemporary world, friendships seem the anomaly, the very thing that for centuries would be so fundamental it could contain within its parameters gay relationships that needn't be of much concern for society or state.

In a very different way, they needn't concern us any more either but for very different reasons, where the pink pound and personal mobility have left gay lives often wealthier and freer than heterosexual ones: the nuclear family became no longer necessarily the capitalist ideal. "I made this film in the image of sexual liberation as I experienced it", Guiraudie says, "which was something I thought of as highly emancipatory and which has finally come to mean that whoever doesn't orgasm today is the ultimate loser." (Bomb) Seeking friendship over sexual desire, possessing a body that needn't cause any problem for friendship but might be deemed a consumer liability, leaves Henri a certain type of loser. How can Guiraudie regard gay liberation as something worth celebrating a priori when a homosexual environment can seem like any other community, indifferent and selfish? As the inspector says, "You have a strange way of loving each other. One of yours gets murdered and you keep fucking."

That is bad enough but Franck goes further in knowing who the killer is and has sex with him. By the end of the film the inspector is dead, so is Henri, and we have witnessed different modes of complicity. The transference of guilt has led Franck to be not only complicit in Henri's murder. He is also potentially fearful over his own death as he still appears to desire Michel, and aware of the lost complicity with his friend who is now no more. But as Michel calls out after him; telling Franck that he needs him, Franck continues to hide in the bush. Then, a minute later, with the light so dark we can hardly make Franck out in the forest, he calls out Michel's name. Is he doing so hoping that he has gone, and can escape free, or is it a beseeching request, hoping that Michel is still there? It seems more the latter than the former and, if so, is Franck willing to sacrifice not just the lives of others but his own life to a desire he cannot resist? In Hitchcock, the characters colluding initially in another's crimes either through blackmail, loyalty or naivety, realise what matters most, and it isn't protecting another person's criminality. In Stranger by the Lake, that question remains moot. "I wanted to make a film coloured by homosexuality, Guiraudie said in the press notes, one, that could become a metaphor of society, desire, and humanity in general." That question is partly about what constitutes a community, and whether a coded, simultaneously furtive and exhibitionistic sexually oriented culture can pass for one.

This is a question of a greater moral murkiness but is also evident in a form that isn't afraid to use, like Hitchcock, point-of-view shots at key moments. However, it also resists many elements that the maestro would regard as essential. The film had no non-diegetic music; it also plays up formal repetition over insistent variety. We keep returning to the establishing shot at the car park as the film moves from one day to the next, and Guiraudie insisted on natural light throughout. "We decided to stick to four states of available light: early afternoon, late afternoon, mid-twilight, and late twilight." (Bomb) Rather than moving towards the sort of set-piece drama Hitchcock mastered (North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much), and the moral certainties that the sequences served, the conclusion here is subdued and troublesome. It is ethically bemusing and visually crepuscular. By the very end, the available light is so low that we can barely distinguish Franck within it. The form meets well its content as we don't know if Franck will live and wonder, if we can hardly see him, whether he will be able to distinguish Michel were he soon to attack. It is a narrative ambiguity to match its moral enquiry, and as the credits come up we might wonder how such an explicit film has arrived at such implicit complicity. We might wonder too if the complicity he had with Henri was finally less conformist than the more conventional, if deadly, desire he has for Michel.


© Tony McKibbin