Stranger by the Lake (**3/4)

Sex and violence and friendship are the subject of this slow-building suspense drama. Directed by Alain Guiraudie, who also plays a small role, the French film makes a virtue of what must have been a tiny budget by making the sole location, a lakeside beach mostly populated by gay men, into a sort of character. The main human character is Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who falls hard for a mustachioed man (Christophe Paou) he sees in the woods, then watches the man drown his lover at twilight. He does not call the police, though a police detective eventually comes calling.

On the slow way to a tension-filled, mysterious ending, Guiraudie seems to be at least as interested in depicting a particular kind of cruising scene as in his characters, and much more so than in morality. While some men swim in the lake, or lounge nude (most of them) on the stony shore, others stroll along the path in the nearby woods, where one might find a casual encounter, then look up to find a schlubby voyeur watching with his pants down. With the bright sun reflected off the lake and the overall quietness (the movie has no music), this all comes off as banal more than seedy, although it is worth noting that this probably had the most explicit sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie theater.

We learn only so much about Franck or his murderous lover. Actually, we learn more about the other major character, a pudgy man who claims only to want peace and quiet after breaking up with his girlfriend, and whom Franck befriends. The blandly handsome Franck is kind of a blank slate, his major attribute a boyish inability to see consequences.

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viewed 3/27/14 7:15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/27/14

Pride (**1/4)

-->? The place is Philadelphia in the age of plaid, when the O’Jays (1974) and Philly soul ruled the charts. Unable to land a job as a math teacher, former college swimmer Jim Ellis (Terrence Howard) takes a job at the run-down Marcus Foster Recreation Center, which is about to be shut down by the city. There, he starts a team that proves that black kids really can swim.

+ The best things here are Howard and the character he plays. While the storyline is heavily fictionalized, it’s true to Ellis’s modest, unassuming way. As a profile of Ellis in February 14’s Philadelphia City Paper put it, “When there was racism, he taught his swimmers to recognize it, then rise above it.” Bernie Mac lends some gentle humor as the rec center’s other employee. The pacing is good.

- Pride strains so hard to be inspirational, as the title suggests, that it feels false. The plotting seems convenient rather than believable. Take, for example, how Ellis supposedly gets his team. One day, a city worker takes down the basketball net outside Foster where five friends like to play. Lo and behold, all five agree to transform themselves into a swim team. Gee, not one of them says, no thanks, I’m not that into swimming? Tom Arnold is the cartoon racist who won’t hire Ellis to work at the preppy “Main Line Academy.” Lo and behold, not only is he the head of the school, but he also coaches the swim team, which just so happens to be the best in the Northeast corridor, thus the eventual rival to Ellis’s team. There’s a cartoon criminal too, singlehandedly representing the element Coach Ellis is trying to help the kids resist. He’s so generic you can barely tell if he’s a drug dealer (as I assumed) or a moonshiner, and the scene where the coach faces him down is way corny. The students themselves are underwritten characters, and there’s hardly anything about swimming or Ellis’s actual coaching techniques.

= **1/4 I’ll admit that the preview audience seemed to like this from the comments I overheard, and it certainly left me in a pleasant mood, but since about a dozen of these “inspirational” BOATS (based on a true story) movies come out every year, there are better ones to watch. Recently preceding this were Invincible, another Philly sports story that was actually partly filmed there, and Freedom Writers, which isn’t a sports movie but covers the raising-up-urban-youth angle. You want both? Watch The Gridiron Gang.

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