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