Dangerous Liaisons

Yo, filmmakers – are we making sexually explicit films now? Is like, non-porn porn a thing these days?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I only ask because methinks we have us a skinstastic trend on our hands. Last year we got the sexually explicit coming-of-age lesbian drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (which came out rated NC-17), and I just saw Stranger By the Lake, which is a Cannes-adored 2013 noir and another (unrated) sexually explicit story, this one about a group of gay men and this idyllic cruising spot of theirs that turns into a deadly trap of passion for one of them.

Not to mention, this year will see the arrival of the eagerly anticipated first part of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, which will be anything but PG-13.

Directed by Alain Guiraudie with voyeuristic panache, Stranger By the Lake tells the story of Franck (a balls-out – literally! – brave and beady-eyed Pierre Deladonchamps), a good-looking mec looking for love in all the wrong places.

Franck is an unemployed fella who has taken to spending his summer afternoons bronzing his beautiful, young bod by the shore of a lovely rural-France lake, which he loves to swim in, too, btw. The woods that surround said lake are a magnet for horny men who cruise, and find, and f--- each other with abandon, in plain view of their peers and of us the audience. There Franck comes across Michel (Christophe Paou), a sexy, tanned, good-bodied hunk of man with a Magnum-style porn stache whose aloof charm belies something weird...a darkness he barely tries to conceal.

Franck is drawn to Michel like a moth to a flame – and Michel’s fire burns hella hot. So much so someone else already has gotten scorched by it.

Michel has gotten rid of one of his flings in the lake (drowned him without hesitation), and Franck knows it (he’s witnessed it), and as he keeps quiet about it, he gets close to Michel, who welcomes Franck’s attention and unspoken favor. What follows is a chronicle of open, yet secret co-consipiracy as aphrodisiac.

There, by the this lake of devil-may-care-ness, Franck completely loses himself, or, at the very least, his sense of what is right because he is becoming consumed by that fire that he so wants and that Michel is offering.

When Guiraudie introduces an authority figure into this milieu, in the form of a cartoon-y string bean of an inspector who walks with his hands crossed behind his back, Stranger By the Lake becomes commentary of how certain modern-day gays relate to one another. He highlights the anonymous, careless, reckless nature of their encounters, and the lack of solidarity that can envelop them.

It’s a point driven across poignantly by what befalls the unlikely friend Franck’s made out by the lake, a pudgy loner named Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao). He ends up being the most strange to us, for we spend lots of time with him and hearing about what amounts to be his sexual ambivalence, but never quite grasping the totality of his sadness (and awareness of the danger that lurks mere feet away) until it’s too late.

The film may get in your face at first, but, if you go with it (which may prove difficult because we never leave the lake), you will see it has gotten in your head.

That’s the thing about menace. It comes packaged so neatly that sometimes you don’t see it for what it really is.

And, like this provocative-in-more-way-than-the-obvious film, it more often than not leaves you wondering.

My Rating ***

Photo: MyFrenchFilmFestival.com.