Daily Archives: Monday, June 6, 2016

  • Stranger by the Lake

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’inconnu du lac

    Alain Guiraudie (2013)

    All the action takes place in the waters and on the shores of the lake of the title (which is in Provence), or in the adjoining car park and woodland.  It’s early summer but few people come to the lake.   None of them is female.  The men visit to sunbathe and swim and cruise for sex.   The writer-director Alain Guiraudie builds up a strong sense of routine and occasionally suggests a code of conduct.  One man, lying on the shore with another, doesn’t like the way that the main character Franck says ‘Hi’.  He reminds Franck that cruising should take place in the woods, not on the lakeside – not that Franck is trying to pick up the man or his companion anyway.   The two men lying together are both nude:  a high proportion of the visitors to the lake are naturists and most of the characters spend much of the film entirely naked, as they lie in the sun or have sex.   Watching Stranger by the Lake made me realise that the only film I think I’ve seen that’s genre-classified as porn is the first Emmanuelle movie.  I don’t really understand the definitions of hard, soft and intermediate grades of porn but there is more naked flesh and there are more explicit sex scenes in the ninety-odd minutes of Alain Guiraudie’s film than in any other movie I’ve seen[1].  (Perhaps more than in any other movie to date which has enjoyed success on the international arthouse circuit?  There’s certainly more sex here than in Blue is the Warmest Colour, in spite of the greater controversy the latter has aroused.)   Between the bouts of screwing, Guiraudie favours holding a shot for a long time and at some distance from the characters.  (He uses this technique to record the crucial event in the film.)  There is no music – only the sound of the water and, more noticeably, the sound of wind through the trees above the shore.  The confident, unhurried rhythm of the film, in combination with this soundtrack and the images of beautiful landscape, lakescape and skyscape (the cinematography is by Claire Mathon), are absorbing.  Yet it’s the physical and sexual candour of Stranger by the Lake that is its most distinctive quality.

    This is also the first film I’ve seen that realises the frank promiscuity of gay life as described in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst (Andrew Davies’s BBC television adaptation of The Line of Beauty was relatively discreet in this respect).  In spite of their shared watery element, the locale of Stranger by the Lake is, however, nothing like as convivial as that of Hollinghurst’s first novel The Swimming-Pool Library.  Along with Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), the two most important characters are Michel (Christophe Paou) and Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao).  Franck is immediately attracted to Michel and pursues him successfully.   The sad, heavy, middle-aged Henri is an incongruous figure among the sleek, unclothed bodies around him on the lakeside.  (Henri takes his tee-shirt off a couple of times but never his shorts.)   He also tells Franck that he was married to a woman, who has recently left him.  For all the physical and, in the case of Franck and Henri, conversational intimacy, the men’s relationships don’t exist beyond the lake and its immediate vicinity.  Other than what Franck says to Henri (and, to a greater extent, vice versa) you know next to nothing about the background of the characters.  Franck and Henri, in turn, invite each other for a drink, then they’re going to have dinner together but none of these things actually happens.  (I don’t remember seeing anyone eat or drink during the film.  It’s as if Alain Guiraudie wants to emphasise that sex is the only real satiation of appetite.)   Although you might assume that some of the partners lying on the shore are partners beyond the woodland and the car park, you don’t see evidence of this.  Michel resists Franck’s attempts to see him away from the lake, even when Franck says he wants them to spend the night together.

    When you first see – from Franck’s distantly voyeuristic point of view (he’s high above the lakeside) – Michel and his current boyfriend Pascal (François Labarthe) locked together in the waters of the lake, you assume at first this is another sexual episode.  Even when one of the men calls out ‘Laisse moi!’, you don’t take it as a cry for help – until the pair disappear underwater and only one of them reappears.  Then Michel swims back to the shore, dries himself with his towel, and calmly gets dressed.  The drowning of Pascal is a remarkable sequence:  Guiraudie’s holding the shot throughout manages to reflect both Michel’s chilling composure and Franck’s willingness, so strongly does he want to be Michel’s sexual partner, to continue to watch unmoving.   Alain Guiraudie has said that Franck is something of an alter ego and that he wanted in the film to explore going all the way with a lover.  Michel, a cold-blooded killer, is the embodiment of dark, dangerous attraction.  Franck saw what he did to Pascal but still wants to get closer to Michel.

    The ending of the film is intentionally ambiguous:  Michel has murdered twice more, with a knife, and Franck wanders through the woods calling out his name, frightened but perhaps, even now, still desiring Michel physically.  One of the two knife victims is Henri, who rumbled Michel even without seeing what Franck saw and who, once the police have come to investigate the drowning, tells Michel as much.   When Franck discovers Henri with his throat cut, the latter gasps with his dying breath that this is what he wanted.   In one of their chats, Henri had talked to Franck about different kinds of attraction but it’s a striking feature of this film (as of much of Alan Hollinghurst’s work) that the characters express themselves almost entirely through their sexual drives.  It’s striking too that, even today, a gay artist like Alain Guiraudie seems to want to suggest that playing with fire is an essential and exciting element of male homosexuality.

    The other most significant character in Stranger by the Lake is the detective Damroder (Jérôme Chappatte), who leads the police investigation into the death of Pascal.   Damroder really is a gatecrasher.  He’s always fully clothed (he seems to wear the same clothes every day) and, apart from some eccentric hand movements, is physically quite unremarkable.   Questioned by Damroder, Franck seems much more scared than he ever appears to be about Michel.   When Michel fatally stabs Damroder it’s the film’s most shocking moment but it also makes sense:  he doesn’t fit – he has to go.   By taking out the police officer then the suspicious Henri, Michel is in effect eliminating the main threats to the survival of a sealed-off sexual paradise and this seemed to me the strongest, most subversive element of the film.  Stranger by the Lake isn’t believable in realistic terms.  The prevailing promiscuity of the characters naturally implies that partners are swapped quickly:  if Michel wants to be rid of Pascal why doesn’t he just leave him?   There will be other cops to replace Damroder too and Michel, who’s known to have been Pascal’s partner, is already being questioned about the death in the lake.  Even so, Guiraudie’s single location is very effective in creating the illusion of a distinct, self-contained world.  As I watched Stranger by the Lake, I was conscious of this illusion and felt that it was sustained entirely by the quality of the film-making.  Thinking about it afterwards, the picture felt more lastingly convincing than I’d expected.  (I’m not sure which of those feelings I should place more faith in.)

    Although there are some witty, barbed exchanges along the way, the film depends for its humour chiefly on the less prepossessing but no less hopeful habitués of the lake and woods.  One man (Mathieu Vervisch), after getting what he wants by sucking off Franck, takes his leave with formal politeness.  You don’t feel embarrassed for the naked actors because the bodies most displayed are in good shape and Alain Guiraudie never exposes less prepossessing ones to ridicule.  The nicely underplayed performances by Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou and the excellent Patrick d’Assumçao complement very effectively the potential luridness of the sex-and-death theme.   At the start, I was worried that it would be impossible to read the white subtitles against the whitish shores of the lake but your eyes adjust.  The English title is much less rich than the French original.  One meaning of inconnu is a freshwater food and game fish:  in their first conversation, Henri tells Franck about a fifteen-foot catfish that’s rumoured to inhabit the lake.  The word inconnu also suggests, of course, not only a human stranger but the larger quality of ‘the unknown’.

    26 February 2014

    [1]  Afternote:  I had, unaccountably, forgotten Derek Jarman’s and Paul Humfress’s Sebastiane when I wrote this.

  • Stories We Tell

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sarah Polley (2012)

    As an autobiographical documentary, Stories We Tell is fascinating, not least because the family members and friends who are the talking heads question and sometimes take exception to what Sarah Polley is up to in making the film, and what she’s asking them to do.  It’s no less absorbing as a drama – in the development of the characters you’re watching on screen, in the narrative’s twists and revelations.   What amounts to the examination of documentary technique and the exposure of its artifice isn’t at all academic and doesn’t in the least detract from the drama – it enriches it.   Polley mixes real home movies with simulated footage of her parents and others.  When I first saw it this summer, I was blind – until a sequence in which Polley is shown directing the actress (Rebecca Jenkins) who’s pretending to be her mother Diane – to this combination.  Having watched Stories We Tell a second time, I can’t understand how I couldn’t tell the genuine and mock home movie material apart:  the actors pretending to be the true-life dramatis personae are clearly not the real thing (and are mostly not very good).   Diane Polley, an actress herself and the pivotal character in the story, died of cancer shortly before her youngest child Sarah’s eleventh birthday in early 1990.  Her second husband Michael Polley is still alive, as are Diane’s four other children from her two marriages.  Stories We Tell is partly about the mystery – and power – of someone who is able yet unable to speak for herself.

    There’s also black-and-white footage of the real Diane performing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ with an adapted lyric:  Sarah Polley inserts this shortly after the viewer has learned about the end of Diane’s first marriage and her subsequent loss of custody of the two children of that marriage.  The changed words of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ are all about keeping things in good financial order.  Diane is a likeable though not especially brilliant performer – it’s when she giggles and says she muffed the last line of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ that the vividness nearly everyone remembers her for – however much their memories of other things may vary – flashes through the screen.  At the heart of Stories We Tell is the question of Sarah Polley’s paternity.  It turns out that her biological father was not Michael but Harry Gulkin, an independent film producer with whom Diane had an affair in 1978, while she was away from the Polley family home in Toronto, appearing in a stage play in Montreal.   Diane had fallen in love with Michael Polley in the mid-1960s when she saw him as Mick in Pinter’s The Caretaker and they appeared together in Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona.   It seems she never stopped loving him but that Michael was unable to reciprocate either emotionally or, in the longer term, physically.  He frustrated his wife in other ways too:  once they’d had two children of their own, he gave up acting to work for an insurance company (this too gives a retrospective apt edge to the ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’ lyric); Diane thought Michael a talented writer but he didn’t pursue that either.   Sarah’s discovery in 2007 that Harry was her biological father, and her breaking this news to Michael, caused the latter to put his thoughts to Sarah in the form of a letter.  This seems to have been the trigger for his getting down to sustained writing.  It’s Michael’s memoir, which he reads under Sarah’s close direction of his line readings, which provides the narrative framework to Stories We Tell.

    Michael reasonably warns Sarah at one point that the family memoir she’s making is bound to be partial because she’ll choose what to keep in and what to lose from the hours of footage she’ll have to edit.  He is largely co-operative with the project, however – in striking contrast to Harry Gulkin, who doesn’t approve of it at all.   In Harry’s view, Sarah’s intention to give ‘equal weight’ to the testimonies of different members of her family is thoroughly misconceived.  As he sees it, the only people qualified to remember what happened between him and Diane Polley are the two directly involved ‘and one of them is dead’.  It’s bizarre that Harry appears to see Diane’s life as consisting purely of that part of it which included him.  The irony is that it’s Sarah’s anxiety about Harry’s threatening to publish an article about her paternity – as the relationship between the newly-discovered father and daughter is beginning to get more complicated – that appears to have been a trigger to her making Stories We Tell.    Nevertheless, Harry evidently agreed to her filming reconstructions of key conversations between them, including the one in which Harry tells her he’s her father; just as Michael consents to re-enact the meeting with Sarah at which she tells him he’s not her biological parent.   This viewer shared the two men’s unease with Sarah Polley’s creating these sequences – although Michael shows in his big scene that he’s not lost his acting ability – and it’s not only in them that her uncompromising approach is in evidence.

    Polley’s siblings (in fact half-siblings) Mark and Joanna sometimes suggest that, while they love Sarah, they got used from an early stage to her being the star of the family and became tolerant of her determination to get her own way.  Yet it must partly be their trust of her that makes all five half-siblings – they also include John and Susy Buchan, the children of Diane’s first marriage, and Harry’s other daughter, Cathy – so engaging to watch and listen to.   The humour and variety of what they have to say (all the more striking because I first saw Stories We Tell the day after I saw Before Midnight) is delightful, often poignant too.   There’s a particularly gripping moment when Joanna says that she thinks Michael did badly by Diane so that she’s glad that her mother was loved by Harry – but that she still feels it was Michael who Diane most wanted to be loved by.

    Michael Polley, who was born and grew up in England, is remarkably candid and incisive not only about his own shortcomings as a husband but also about what he thinks attracted Diane to him in the first place.   He believes that Diane fell in love with him because of the dynamic characters he was able to be on stage but couldn’t be in real life.  When she made this film, Polley was taking a break from adapting Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace for the screen and Stories We Tell opens with the following quote from Atwood’s novel:

    ‘When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else.’

    Sarah Polley’s achievement in Stories We Tell is to convey not just the rich interweaving of the lives of members of a family but also that the revelations about her parentage don’t mean that her family life as a girl was a lie:  it was, as it were, a different truth.  What’s so sad about Diane Polley’s concealment of her relationship with Harry Gulkin is that it was rooted in the traumatic experience of the end and aftermath of Diane’s first marriage and, as Joanna Polley suggests, her mother’s determination that her second husband was going to be the main man.   Michael’s memoir includes the interesting notion that, in the nothingness of many generations that preceded him, he was, if not personally there, always going to be there – and that individuals are, in that sense, born complete.  I’m not sure how this squares with what he says to Sarah late on in the film:  that if she had been his biological daughter she’d have been utterly different.

    4 July 2013

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