PRIX FIXE #2: STRANGER BY THE LAKE
Pairings for a perfect movie about sex (and death) on the beach
Welcome to “Prix Fixe” — a new series on Never Cursed where I pair a movie I love with a set menu of other art I’m enjoying right now … paintings, movies, music, poetry, etc etc etc. A more evergreen/thematic way to do a weekly culture dispatch, and an excuse to recommend some of my favorite movies. This week — morbid make outs and troubled waters in Stranger by the Lake (dir. Alain Guiraudie).
I spent Saturday afternoon at IFC Center with Carlen watching a matinee of French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie’s new film Misericordia. When the movie cut to black, Carlen laughed so loudly in the pin-drop quiet theater that all of our row mates started giggling too. A generous laugh is such a gift in a theater, especially when you’re seeing a movie by an Important European Filmmaker, and Carlen has one of my all time favorite laughs to hear in the middle of a self-serious crowd. We cackled pretty much the entire way through the movie’s second half, which I’d like to think Guiraudie would appreciate. Misericordia is only playing on a couple screens in NY/LA right now so if you like any of the below, run don’t walk to catch it on the big screen:
Twisted mushroom dinner scenes à la Phantom Thread
Bumbling small town cops à la Memories of Murder
Ambivalent queer homecoming stories à la Bad Education
In honor of Misericordia’s release, this week’s Prix Fixe is about Guiraudie’s Cannes-lauded 2013 erotic thriller Stranger by the Lake.
P.S. Catch Carlen’s fantastic new short Romance Package for Two on Short of the Week.
PRIX FIXE #2 : STRANGER BY THE LAKE
It’s well documented on Never Cursed that one of my favorite subgenres is People Having A Bad Time On Vacation. Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 thriller Stranger by the Lake is equal parts taut psychological thriller and taut-bodied erotic summer film, lensing its rural queer setting with a combination of Hitchcock’s attention to POV/suspense and Rohmer’s juxtaposition of the natural and the interpersonal. While cruising for passionate hook ups and platonic conversation on a lakeside gay beach, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) encounters the gorgeous, mustachioed Michel (Chistophe Paou). When tragedy strikes, Guiraudie ingeniously exploits the queer cruising spot’s norms of discretion and mistrust of the cops to foil the local police’s investigation. Like Guiraudie’s new film Misericordia, Stranger by the Lake is less concerned with constructing a law-enforcement-driven “whodunnit” and more interested in the laws and limits of attraction and loneliness.
(Really fucking excellent) DP Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Atlantics)’s tightly-controlled cinematography and Guiraudie’s expertly-constructed script develop Stranger by the Lake’s terrain into an increasingly perilous emotional and topographical minefield, transforming our perspective on the movie’s setting from passive voyeurism into unsettling, captivated complicity.
TO LOOK AT: POL ANGLADA’S ILLUSTRATIONS
I love the work of Pol Anglada, a Catalan illustrator and senior designer at Loewe, whose drawings share Stranger by the Lake’s voyeuristic queer POV. His work is beautiful, disorienting, horny, exuberant, funny, keenly observed… Anglada draws textiles and bodies with an almost futurist attention to line and motion, treating the curve of a thigh like the sleek curve of a sports car, but without sacrificing his sense of texture. There’s also a strange line between Anglada’s work, the films of Alain Guiraudie, and Barbara Hepworth, one of my favorite sculptors — all are fascinated by the relationship between the individual and the setting around them, whether that “landscape is” the back seat of a car, a pebbled lake beach, or a dramatic Cornish cliffside.
TO WATCH: TRUE THINGS (dir. HARRY WOOTLIFF)
Another excellent contemporary take on unsettling lakeside eros. Harry Wootliff is one of my favorite living filmmakers, consistently crafting magnetic but understated explorations of modern love, lust, and emotional isolation. 2021’s True Things centers a career-best performance from Ruth Wilson who plays Kate, a lonely woman who embarks on an affair with the charming but chaotic “Blond” (Tom Burke). We (and Kate) know there’s no way this relationship ends well, but can’t blame Kate for wanting to blow up her quietly unhappy life. Wootliff and Guiraudie both earn laughs through the ill-advised but believable choices of their patiently-built characters while simultaneously ratcheting up tension and atmosphere.
TO LISTEN TO: “VIRTUAL WALK-RELAX IN THE RAIN IN A FRENCH FOREST AUTUM”
I’ve been getting really into these long YouTube mixes of “virtual walks” … there’s something beautiful and creepily intimate about trudging along in someone else’s POV. Cue up this French countryside jaunt after watching Stranger by the Lake if you want some more Gallic voyeurism.
TO READ: FRANK O’HARA “HOMOSEXUALITY”
So we’re taking our masks off, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? …
I’ve been re-reading a lot of Frank O’Hara’s poems since moving back to New York. A lot of his work is set in and around the West Village where I grew up, and reading his poems feels like a precious window into a pre-Sweetgreen era of the neighborhood. After “Homosexuality”’s catalogue of the vibes of various NY cruising spots, O’Hara gives a shout that feels of a piece with Stranger by the Lake ‘s sweaty, rootless eroticism:
“It’s a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”
xoH
I love STRANGER BY THE LAKE! When I saw that you covered it here, I had to read this. So happy someone else is aware of this fantastic film!