L'Étranger ou L'Inconnu ?

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1 March

This is a review of Stranger by the Lake (L’Inconnu du Lac) (2013)

For some who might wish to know, this film contains no female roles and probably as much graphic sex as Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)

Amongst other things, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin showed that nothing quite evokes the quotidian as showing that, day by day, people choose to do the same thing (in this case, parking in a sandy spot with a few trees), and a shot of that place and a car drawing up can also be used to denote the passing of time – and to disrupt that easy sense of denotation*. That rate at which time passes can, in itself, be used to play counter to the audience’s expectation of how quickly events should happen, what should happen, what we should see :

This film leaves us in no doubt that we see what director Alain Guiraudie wants us to see, but that may not feel a positive experience for us, even if reflection suggests that confronting us with a slow pace, much fairly promiscuous sex, and the absence, otherwise, of much other than sometimes tense conversations might be calculated to unsettle. Hitchcock, it seems, would have done it that way, although perhaps his script would have had filmic goals, in particular an ending, that this one does not.

If our sex-life is not of a nature (the film calls it ‘cruising’) where people could be talking with someone new and then head inland to caress each other within minutes and have penetrative sex, such uninhibited actions present a challenge – not in terms of whether one wants to watch gay sex, as in what anything more significant might mean**. Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who says that he has done all this before on holiday and does not seem much interested, values Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) as a person to talk to, maybe over dinner or a few drinks, a feeling that may be shared equally, although Franck’s deepest desire is to find someone whom he fancies who is not already involved (and, for no apparent reason, dashes off after someone when the two first talk).

Someone gay who also watched this screening said that even knowing about a man what Franck knows about Michel (Christophe Paou) would not have stopped him being attractive and a desirable partner (whether or not the actual Michel is, who seems like a more serious type of Tom Selleck). Given what Franck does know, that seems surprising, in the way that Peter Gabriel (on his album Up) characterizes the audience of his fictitious Barry Williams Show, I love my daughter’s rapist, etc.

What matters, though, is that – of brief origin though it is – Franck feels love for Michel, albeit after the event. We will never know why Michel did what Franck knows about, we will never know what happens at the end of the film, we just see Franck relating to him, knowing that he did it. The film does build tension (though not without a running joke at the expense of the man with his shorts half down and, hand on his penis, likes to watch), and a script and a film-maker can withhold things from us*** – as said, it is made abundantly clear that we are shown what Guiraudie chooses, and that this is not a film that, unlike life, ends tidily.

However, does the end justify the means, just gradually – and effectively – stirring us up about something and leaving us hanging… ? OK, so life is not neat, we do not always know what happened and / or why, and Ingrid Bergman may not always escape the clutches of James Mason into the arms of Cary Grant, but can the point of resisting that resolving temptation just be to involve one in something (unreal) that one could not know anything about otherwise, and then suddenly say that whatever happened next is just unstated. If so, Haneke does that better, many, many times, not least with L'Amour (2012).

Haneke, however, does just not refrain from telling us definitely what is happening only at the end, but throughout – we may come to a conclusion, say, about the character or behaviour of Georges, but it deliberately may be one of several. This is where Stranger by the Lake (and it might be worth considering who we consider ‘the stranger’ of the title to be) leads us on, and then slams the brakes on at the end**** – yes, we know that several things may occur on the given facts, but why is it apt just to leave us with them ? Not that it matters much, but the film feels a little as though it may have broken faith with its audience :

I will show you this, which leads to this, which leads to this, and, when matters have become really critical, down come some pseudo-philosophic shutters, closing off what we might not know definitely in life. Yet one can be sure of two things. One, that, because of what has happened, someone will have to decide, beyond the scope of the film, what then took place and why. Two, that, as this is not life, we were allowed to see and hear things (such as Henri and Franck’s conversations), and have a perspective, which is just denied by this ending, which is therefore arbitrary.

Not so much Reader, I married him, as Reader, I’m not telling you any more after all.


Afterthought

Or maybe it does make for a genuinely suspenseful ending after all - in the sense Nous sommes suspendus...


End-notes

* As when there are no cars when Franck arrives, or when we see him walking down the path to the lake without arriving.

** In Nymphomaniac Volume I (2013), for example, two friends between them have sex with a score of men on a train just in a contest over a bag of Smarties.

*** We know nothing outside this place, and even the representative of authority keeps making visits here, at all sorts of hours, rather than taking a fairly ad hoc and low-key approach.

**** The Woman in the Fifth (2011) does so, but for a different reason that relates to the novel that it adapts.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Not Haneke's way

This is a reaction to seeing Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 December

This is a reaction to seeing Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Michael Haneke shows something, but leaves it to us what it means, what happened, and he has not deviated from it with Amour (2012). This is something that I value and regard as honesty, that he wants us to be co-creators of the film, and, in interviews that are the ‘extras’ on DVD releases, he has talked clearly about this aspect of film-making, e.g. with Hidden (Caché) (2005) and its ending.

That said, a friend of a friend thought the film was depressing and that it was obvious - not open to question - what had happened and why that was, so one can’t please everyone : on that view, the path had been shown, and was an inevitable and downwards one, and the response was to feel that the film itself was gloomy.

I disagreed, not because, for its own sake, I embrace the depiction of someone deteriorating (although, obviously, people do deteriorate, and that is not unrelated to death and mortality, but Amour is not a documentary), but since deterioration was not, as I saw it, the point of the film, but, rather, that it said something about Anne and Georges, about their relationship : this, too, was an account of the film to which this other viewer could not relate.


If one doubted that there are ambiguities, here are some examples :

* Anne does not tell us why she asks Georges to turn off the new CD of her former pupil Alexandre Tharaud (as himself) playing Schubert – she does not explain the request, so we could infer one of several things, such as that she does not wish to be reminded of Tharaud’s recent visit (for any number of reasons), or of her own inability to play

* When Georges is playing the piano, why he stops, and does not continue or explain, when Anne asks him why he has stopped

* Why Georges dismisses the second nurse whom he engaged – is it really because he is disgusted with her care of Anne, or because he does not want her around and invents a pretext to pay her off ?

* What becomes of Georges and why he chose to do as he did (then and now)


I do not think that I need go on. The point is that Haneke and his film are silent on these things – he is not telling us the answers, and we have to decide for ourselves the rationale in these two people’s minds and hearts. He may have a choice in mind that they made, but he has left it to us to make inferences and not pointed to it. So the viewer who finds the film depressing may be projecting a trajectory onto it, but I say that it is not the only one, and that maybe it was hoped that we would feel more torn, not just about the judgements that we may find ourselves making here, but more generally in life.

Not, though, a didacticism in film-making, I would say, but merely mirroring the complexity of our being, that I may guess at what you mean or your actions, but can I be sure? And was Emmanuelle Riva as Anne ever really helpless ? She was defiant, in pain, stubborn, she was a person, and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her husband (and another person), was caring, bewildered, resigned, and even frustratedly angry with her.

The film, on my view, was about them and only about what happened to Anne in how it affected them : at the outset, when Georges has been trying to determine what has happened to Georges, she says that he is a monster, but that he is also (I forget the exact word) kind (or caring), and that description rang with me, in a quiet way, as I saw him during the film, and saw her for seeing him that way.

Both actors were in these roles fully, Trintignant, for example, with his trainers about the flat and his varying facial expression, and the reality that Anne and he brought to the everyday made the moments of imagination, memory, dream and even terror that came more powerful – a seeming naturalism against which their unusualness could come to the fore.

As I have suggested, we felt that we were on the inside of Anne’s experience, not that something was happening to her and she was a victim : when she desires her death, there is even a recollection of the grim humour of Samuel Beckettt’s novel Malone Dies, where he writes (Malone is the writer / narrator) that, if he had the strength, he would throw himself out of the window.

Their daughter Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert, seemed on the outside of it all, not just because she was kept out, but because her belief in medical science meant that she was to slow to acknowledge what had happened and was happening (and that led to her being kept out). Tharaud, too, concentrating too much on what had happened to Anne and not on being with her, almost seemed to doubt that Anne, whom one felt he viewed as her wheelchair, could benefit from hearing him play for them.

This film contains beautiful French, beautifully spoken, and with subtitles that intelligently interpret the dialogue. As to why it is called Amour, not L’Amour, I have puzzled over that one. Thanks to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amour_(homonymie), I know, though, that a film of the same name in 1971 also dropped the article (although the title of the novel by Marguerite Duras did not):

I still busy myself with whether, as I suspect, the meaning ‘love’ is changed by the omission to be of less general application, as in amour fou, where one knows that Love is not embodied, but a type (or example) of love.




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