Writer/director Alain Guiraudie's film Stranger by the Lake depicts a love triangle that develops at a cruising area as Franck ( Pierre Deadonchamps ) befriends Henri ( Patrick d'Assumcao ), but lusts after Michel ( Christophe Paou ). Even though Franck spies Michel drowning his boyfriend, Ramiere ( Francois-Renaud Labarthe ), he can't resist coupling up with the murdering hunk. They share many explicit encounters before things turn ominous.
Guiraudie's film is atmospheric and guaranteed to get tongues ( along with other body parts ) wagging. In a recent meeting, the filmmaker spoke ( with the assistance of a translator ) to me about creating his seductive, erotic thriller.
Windy City Times: Given that the entire film is shot on the nude beach, in the water, and in the woods, and that the all-male cast is mostly naked, can you discuss what you spent on costumes and locations?
Alain Guiraudie: [Laughs, answers in English] The beach was free. The costumes were 1,500 euros—expensive!
WCT: Your film is very much about voyeurism and the male gaze. The naked men on the beach look at us, the viewer. There is a scene in which Franck spies on a murder. There are also the men in the woods looking at other guys having sex. Can you talk about this visual theme?
Alain Guiraudie: I think the theme of voyeurism wasn't really something that was predominant for me. I think what I was more interested in was about "how to look, and how things look," and one of the questions I was interested in answering was, "How do you show naked men on the beach? How do you film them when you are opposite them?" So it was really more a question of how to show things, and how people saw things than voyeurism itself. Going back to the example of shooting naked men on the beach, when you and just looking directly at them, if they have their legs spread out, their sexual organs are going to appear large in the image. So I thought I could move the camera slightly off to the side, but in the end, we decided it was better to do it in this very frontal way.
WCT: Why was that?
Alain Guiraudie: Because that's how it is! I did it that way, because I've gone to these kinds of nude beaches. That's the way it is—you look directly at them, and that's what you see. This is really a film where nothing is hidden. There were some things need to be hidden but nothing about the body needs to be hidden. The other thing I was interested in doing—and I don't know if it is linked to voyeurism—was addressing the whole question of point of view and how we look at things. And [there's the question of] how are the ways we look at things received by the object that we are looking at. What I also thought was interesting was to play with the idea that you can oftentimes have the same look, and one day, that look from one point of view can seem very benevolent, very inviting, and very loving, but the next day, you can be looking at the same image or view and, suddenly, it can seem very disturbing, very threatening and even very oppressive.
WCT: You deliberately show viewers the murder through the trees—why did you make it unambiguous?
Alain Guiraudie: I wanted the viewer to know exactly the same information that Franck knew. I wanted the audience to be with him, and I didn't want viewers to get involved on a psychological level with Franck trying to determine "Should he tell the police, should he not tell the police?" I didn't want it to be a psychological film in that respect, so it was really obvious for me to let the audience know. The main thrust of the plot is here's Franck, and he's caught between desire and the ethical questions, the moral questions—"Should I turn this guy into the police because he just killed someone?"
WCT: Can you talk about the love triangle between Henri, Franck and Michel?
Alain Guiraudie: I think what's very interesting is that it posits to very different approaches to what is love and what is desire.
On the one hand, you have the relationship between Franck and Michel, and it's something very sexual, and the desire is all consuming and that's the primary aspect of that relationship. But then you have the relationship between Franck and Henri. Again, it's a relationship that's more disturbing. It's less clear what it is about. It's certainly friendship, but you can also say that it's a love relationship between Franck and Henri, too.
The way I deal with desire in the film is that I really began to like this idea of the spiral quality of desire, and it is this circular movement that goes between Franck and Michel and Franck and Henri and they way they all interact with each other—the circular motion—which really became evident during the editing process.
WCT: How did you work with your actors?
Alain Guiraudie: I think a large part of the work was actually done during the casting process. Because what was important there was to find two actors that would work together well as a couple. When they actually did come together, a lot of that work had been done in advance by casting them. I think we would then take the script and discuss it, and discuss the scenes; with the sex scenes, there was much more intense discussion.
WCT: What can you say about filming the sex scenes, which are pretty explicit?
Alain Guiraudie: We had a lot of discussions, and did a lot of rehearsing. It was really exploring where I could take them, and how far they were willing to go in the scene. What I wanted to do was in the characters that the actors were portraying, I wanted them to invest something of themselves. I didn't want to stuff them into a pre-designed mold of what these characters were going to be. And through the rehearsal process and with talking to them, about the sex scenes in particular, we worked on the positions, and the "choreography" as it were, that because we did so much preliminary work, when the time actually came to shoot it, it went very, very easily.
©2013 Gary M. Kramer
Stranger by the Lake opens at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., on Feb. 21.
