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Interview: Alain Guiraudie on Stranger by the Lake

Guiraudie spoke of his ’70s fixation, his attraction to the mythical, and Stranger by the Lake as existential study.

Interview: Alain Guiraudie on Stranger by the Lake
Photo: Strand Releasing

Alain Guiraudie’s transcendent Stranger by the Lake is a film that can be shortly synopsized as a summertime cruising thriller, but warrants a book-length treatise on its scary, yet resonant, exploration of carnal and psychological minutia. The story follows a fit Frenchman, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who hits an unnamed beach almost daily and falls for Michel (Christophe Paou), who might be one of the most persuasive “wrong men” in cinema’s history. Michel is a tall, mustachioed dish to whom Franck can’t help but gravitate, going against the advice offered him by his paternal confidant, Henri (Patrick D’Assumçao), and even defying his conscience when he watches Michel murder a former lover. Through Guiraudie’s magnificently visceral technique, which achieves a unification of Franck and the viewer in both perspective and attraction, Stranger by the Lake fearlessly plumbs the dark corners of desire, or as Guiraudie tells it, the limits.

Meeting me in the Elinor Bunim Munroe Theater at Film Society Lincoln Center, which, starting today, will be showing a retrospective of Guiraudie’s work in celebration of his latest release, the 49-year-old filmmaker opened up about the wide terrain his modestly mounted thriller covers. He spoke of his fixation with the 1970s, his attraction to the mythical, and how Stranger by the Lake, which has stirred up buzz for its virtually unadulterated sex scenes, is ultimately an existential study.

At times, it’s tempting to read Stranger by the Lake as an allegory for HIV/AIDS, particularly when Franck is warned by a police detective that there’s a “gay killer” in his community. But that assessment feels too simplistic for a film that invites so many readings about desire. Can you say to what degree the fear of HIV/AIDS factored into the crafting of the story?

The fear of AIDS didn’t really play a role for me in the film, but on the other hand, it’s very important, because AIDS has to be present. It has to be something that hovers over the whole film. Because it was something that, at the time, had profoundly affected our love relationships, and our sexual relationships. So while there wasn’t the fear of it, it was something that was always present for me in the film. And it’s not just homosexual relationships, it’s also heterosexual relationships—both were really changed as a result of AIDS.

You said “at the time.” Are you referencing when AIDS was more of a dire crisis for the culture, or when your film takes place? Because the film doesn’t seem to be set in any specific time period.

The film really takes place now, but, as in pretty much all of my films, there’s always a mixture of the present and the 1970s, because that was the period when I grew up. I think the film is also a reflection of this progression of how things changed from the 1970s to the present. Because, in the 1970s, you had a sexual liberation movement in which people felt free—they felt emancipated. Now, in this post-AIDS period, we have a return to a more puritanical way of looking at things—a return to a sort of puritism and conservativism that has turned sexual freedom into a more consumer-type sex. So that element that was present in the 1970s has really changed, and not for the better. We’re seeing a darker approach, where sex is something to be consumed. It doesn’t have that same aura that it had in the 1970s.

So, this film’s depiction of the raw power of desire—is that your way of responding to, or combating, these shifted views of sexuality?

[laughs] Well, I’m not really someone who’s fought hard against consumerism either! I think what I really wanted to do was make a film not just about desire, but our relationship with it, and, more specifically, my relationship with it. And since you mentioned this “raw desire,” I’d like to say that, from a political point of view, one of the things I really wanted to do was to put sex and sexual organs in the forefront of the film. I wanted to show that they are also part of desire and great love. Traditionally, we’ve seen these great love stories in major motion pictures, but none of [those sexual elements] are seen. If we want to see the act of sex and the sexual organs, the only real place has been pornography. So my idea here was to reunite the two—the idea of the tremendous passion, and the great love story, together with the physical side of it.

I don’t want to get too hung up on the film’s forthright physical acts, but to what extent did the actors actually participate in the sex scenes? Clearly, we see that they’re engaging in some of them, but was there a line that was drawn in terms of how far they would go?

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We used body doubles for the non-simulated sex, and it was something I talked about with the actors a great deal. I wanted to see just how far they were willing to go, and that was just as far as they wanted to go—they didn’t want to actually do it.

I think the most fascinating thing for me was the way in which Franck seemed more drawn to Michel after witnessing his crime. It made me think of the allure of the illicit and the “forbidden,” no matter its source. Do you think that’s something the queer community can connect to more, given that we’ve historically been trained to believe our desires are wrong?

I don’t really go along with the idea that, in the gay community, something illicit is going to make it more attractive, because I don’t think that’s any more true there than it is with heterosexuals. And I felt it was very important to show that Franck really wanted Michel before the murder, and that he continued to want him after the crime.

I guess I’m just thinking that, in relation to my own experience, I went more than half my life being told that my homosexual feelings were wrong. So when I finally submitted to those feelings, defying the learned “wrongness” of them made it that much more liberating. I’m not saying I’d go courting a killer, but there’s something fundamentally relatable about the all-stops-pulled extent of Franck’s desire.

Well, what I really wanted to do here was to show that Franck is someone who obeys his own desire, and he follows it to the limit. He doesn’t yet know what the limit is, but he’s willing to follow his desire to it. We see Franck questioning himself, we see him concerned, but there’s never a level of excitement because of the danger. I think, in this sense, my point of view is one that’s really very romantic, and I think it’s also something that’s not often shown in films—someone who’s willing to go as far as his desire will take him. That’s really the central question of the film: “Just how far am I willing to go to live and experience what I want, and be satisfied?”

There’s also something very implicitly mythic about this tale, and this world. It’s almost imperceptible, but there were moments when I thought Michel might be imagined, like when he walks out of the water as if he’s some mythical figure. As a viewer, I’m very glad he’s not imagined, but did you ever consider making those sort of impressions more literal?

Well, first of all, it gives me a lot of pleasure that you say that. One of the reasons is, as a filmmaker, I really tried to show everyday life as something mythic—to give it a mythic dimension. As far as the character of Michel, I tried to do that with him too, especially in the scene where he comes out of the water. In that scene I was almost treating him like a Greek god who’s come out of the water back to where Franck is sitting. I also think that the actual structure, and the way the film is set up, in that all of the action takes place in one single location, is something that also reflects Greek tragedy. That’s an element I worked hard to show as well.

I think some of that mythical sensation—and this relates back to what we discussed about danger and desire—comes from the voyeuristic point of view that the audience shares with Franck. We often see things through his eyes, particularly the murder and the Greek-god moment that occurs directly after, and we’re thus pulled that much more into his wants and fantasies. Michel’s power grows for both Franck and the viewer.

You’re right. There’s something that becomes more dense and more intense for Franck at that moment. And because we see it through him, it becomes more intense for us as well. And I think that’s really at the heart of the question, “What is it that a film does? What does the film do for us?” There’s a process of identification that takes place in this film, and it’s something that, I, as a director, can no longer control once you, the viewer, see it. It calls on your own personal experience as well.

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These shots from Franck’s point of view, and this dreamy image of Michel, made me curious about casting versus composition. Had you already cast Cristophe Paou as Michel when crafting a lot of these shots, or did you know the sort of actor you wanted during prep, and then cast accordingly?

Everything was written, just as you see it, before I cast the film. I really didn’t have any particular actor in mind, and I have to say that the actor who finally played Michel in no way resembles what my original idea of Michel was like.

Well, it’s interesting because you had mentioned the 1970s, and with the thick mustache and everything, Michel has this very 1970s look.

It’s true. [laughs] You know, when I first envisioned this character, I saw him as someone who was older, someone who was more settled, someone who was more of an average Frenchman. And, at that point, I hadn’t thought of him having this kind of Tom Selleck look. But he does have it.

There’s also a certain mythic quality to the film’s repetition. There’s that repeated shot of the parking lot, which effortlessly informs us of each new day, but is sort of hypnotic too. What were you most hoping to achieve with the repetition?

This is something that really does go along with this idea of mythification. I spoke before about trying, with this film, to make the everyday seem more mythical. And the fact that we always return to the same place—the parking lot, the repetition of the scene—means we never see them anywhere else. We never see the characters in a restaurant, or at home, or anywhere other than this place. That return keeps bringing us back, and it also often comes after a moment of tension. But either way, we’re still in the same place. And I think it was a way to help prevent what’s happening from becoming ordinary—by just keeping it all in this single scene.

And is the location close to where you live? Because I know you often like to work near your home in the south of France.

No, this place is actually 600 kilometers from where I live! But it is inspired by a place that’s not too far from where I live.

Well, can you discuss the locale, how you came upon it, and how it perhaps inspired the story? Because from the beach to the woods, it feels so amenable to the narrative, like an arena that was set up for this story to be told.

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Well, it’s a place that’s real, but in film, we indulge in taking something that’s real and rearranging that reality, making it a little less real than what it is in actuality. But it’s true that it’s a very scenic setting, and the idea for a setting like this was something we had worked on in the script right from the beginning. It was something we had worked hard to define—the type of place we wanted. And just on a more practical level, the beach that I was originally considering was relatively straight. But when we found this beach, which actually has a curve in it, we felt that was even better. We felt it was really something.

And within that space, you offer what I saw as a cross-section of what could be the gay community, but let’s say it’s any sexual community—you have the dominant ones, the attractive ones, the young and impressionable ones, and the desperate ones who can often just masturbate because they’re not desired. Did you strive to present that spectrum of sexual beings, and does it come from your own experiences?

This was, for me, a very interesting aspect of what I wanted to show. Because if you consider the three main characters, you can actually look at them as being just one person—the same man, but at three different points in his life, or in three different aspects of his life. So those were the three central characters. But for the characters around them, I really wanted to include the kinds of people that I had come across in the homosexual community. These were all, you know, types that I had encountered—real kinds of people.

You mentioned that, with Stranger by the Lake, you wanted to make a film that was specifically about your relationship with desire, and you also noted that the way it portrays desire is uncommon in cinema. In the end, do you think one has outweighed the other in what you’ve made—a reflection of your own desires versus how you’d like to see desire explored? Or are they intertwined?

I think, for me, it wasn’t so much about making a film about my own desire or the way I’d like to see desire expressed on the screen. I think I was concerned more with existential questions. It really came down to the issue I raised before about how far someone is willing to go to follow his desire to its fruition, or its culmination. And there are a number of questions related to that: “Is it worth taking risks in order to satisfy your desire? Or is it better to stifle your desire in order to avoid danger? Is it better to avoid things that may, possibly, be harmful for you?” And I think there’s the question of, “How does the idea of desire, and pursuing desire, hold up when we look at it in comparison with other, important moral questions?” So I was really looking at it on this broader scale, and I think there’s even another question that Henri represents—this idea of love with sex and love without sex. Is it possible to have a love relationship without sex? One that goes beyond sex? These were the issues I really wanted to explore.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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