Alain Guiraudie raised a few eyebrows (and not only) with his Stranger by the Lake (2013), which premiered in Cannes. This year, Guiraudie is back in competition with Staying Vertical. After the erectile and ejaculatory scenes of his previous Cannes screener, were we getting a hint of more of the same via the title? Not quite, but suffice to say that Guiraudie’s new film is stranger in the country than his previous outing at the lake.
The film follows Leo (Damien Bonnard) as he drives through the southern French countryside. Seeing a cute young man on the road, he stops and asks the classic chat-up line of “Have you ever thought of being in the movies?” The boy is not interested and shuts himself away, leaving an old man – his grandfather? – sitting out in the front garden. Later on in the film, Leo returns to the house, discovering the nature of the relationship between the elderly Pink Floyd fan and the beautiful young man. But before he does, he moves onto a nearby farm, where he meets a shepherdess, Marie (Linda Hair) and quickly sets up home with her, her father (Raphael Thierry) and her two sons. Yet this turns out to be no bucolic idyll.
Aside from the wolves lurking in the hills preying on the livestock, there are sexual predators in the film, Leo included. He cannot be happy with a woman and Marie appears to be suffering from post-natal depression after the birth of their son. When she leaves, Leo finds himself in the midst of a homosexual tug-of-war involving the other three men in this verdant corner of France.
However, Guiraudie decides to incorporate another, completely extraneous character to this already bizarre tale. When Leo’s baby won’t stop crying, he sets off in a rowing boat to seek the help of a natural healer. Considering she lives in some kind of wooden hut whose interior is adorned mainly with tendrils (which are attached to Leo like a life-support system), her wifi reception must be pretty good. Leo is a writer and has been leading his agent on a merry dance, asking for advances and promising work he never writes. When the healer calls in the agent, it sets up perhaps the funniest scene of the film. Looking like a hero from a Vietnam movie, Leo wades through the waters and hides in the undergrowth to avoid the inevitable confrontation. Yet for all its humour, this entire episode seems redundant and takes the audience away from the main story.
When Leo hits the road again, we feel the film meandering as aimlessly as its protagonist. As the plot thickens, so its credibility sinks. This is not to say that it is entirely without merit. There is a lot of humour here and some fantastic performances, particularly from Thierry as the sausage-fingered farmer. If audiences were expecting some of the titillation offered by Stranger by the Lake, they will be disappointed.
There are plenty of sex scenes, but perhaps the most graphic scene is that of the birth of Leo’s child. This caused more gasps than any vulva or cock on display, which shows that audiences are now immune to the shock factor of mere genitals. Unfortunately, we might also have become immune to Guiraudie, from whom we expected so much but who didn’t deliver.
