Un lac

How to sum up Un Lac? It's no easier than with Sombre or La Vie nouvelle, the two last films by Philippe Grandrieux. Suffice to say that Grandrieux has been hotly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as one of Europe's most innovative and uncompromising filmmakers, his visionary films testing the very limits of screen language. This minimalist new work is at once Grandrieux's most accessible film and his most abstract. The vestigial narrative takes place in a frosty Northern landscape of forests and mountains, where young woodchopper Alexis lives with his sister, their blind mother and a younger brother. Then one day a younger man arrives on the scene... Grandrieux doesn't make events easy for us to follow, often shooting in near-darkness, with sparse dialogue sometimes pitched barely above a whisper.

But narrative apart, the film is distinctive for the unique, self-enclosed world that Grandrieux creates with a palette reduced almost to monochrome: a world of stillness and near-silence, of forbidding yet alluring landscapes whose affinities are as much with the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, as with the cinematic ilk of Alexandr Sokurov, Bela Tarr and Fred Kelemen.

This picture is thought provoking, but not too interesting when first you shake off the tense mood of the movie created by an extensive use of hand-held, non-focus/focus combinations, close-ups, intense darkness, cold whiteness and sparse saturation.

It sets out in an frozen, timeless universe of the deep mountains, an isolated place, the only connection to a possible outside world (never exposed) being a lake.

Form the beginning the movie makes itself prone to numerous sorts of psychoanalytical interpretation frames (and, indeed, to possibilities for over-interpretation): the fight of the super-ego against ego and id, liberation of the id, completion of the sexual self, mother complexes, father complexes, and so forth.

This psychological is not necessarily a strength, but possibly a necessity for the plot to work. We are talking topics like quasi-incestuous relations, possible schizophrenia, the fear of the unknown ways of adult life and so on.

Altogether, this movie is overloaded with symbolic possibilities, but the cinematic work is excellently simplistic. For those who have the patience to take in the seriously slow pace of the film, it is well worth the inevitable annoyance.

First this film for most of the time is visionary, hallucinatory and is quite simply superb. Philippe Grandrieux was until I saw this film unknown to me. I have not had time to discover if the UK has bothered to make him known to us, and I am not sure if the USA has bothered either. This is a great shortcoming if they have ignored him and all I do know is that ' Un Lac ' was shown at a London Film Festival. Other reviewers have described what happens, so I will not repeat what they have to say. Except for the appearance of other family members towards the last part the film it concentrates on an intense love between a young woodcutter and his sister. The brother has epileptic fits and these are painfully shown and the actor who plays the brother is excellent. I would give the film a 10 for his acting alone, except I have reservations over why the film was made in the way that it is. A young man enters their relationship looking for work and the three of them form a bond together. All well and good, but the ambiguity between the three, and dare I say it the emerging love of all three for each other shifts focus into a more ' plot ' like structure. For me that unbalanced the film, almost Bergman like at times. A semi-explicit sex scene was not at all necessary. Previous to that, and this maybe a contradiction, the film existed in a sort of chaste eroticism and with that one scene of sexuality that rare feeling of who desires who faded away. I also found the second young man, the intruder between brother and sister, too conventionally handsome and his brooding face expressed far less than Dmitriy Kubasov who had facial faults that made him truly beautiful. Natalie Rekorova as the sister was also fine in her role. But now for serious questioning. The setting is a harsh Winter landscape ( beautifully and imaginatively filmed ) and the atmosphere to a certain extent medieval. This brought crazily to mind Bergman's ' The Virgin Spring ' via Sokurov, the great Russian director, which now brings me to the question of why the cast have clearly Russian names and speaking French ? I understand French fortunately and yet some of the very few sentences in the film escaped me. Did the director feel these actors had the edge over a French choice and like Alice in Wonderland I am wandering mentally all over the place, and again why ? Why medieval ? Why these actors, and despite the brilliantly hermetic atmosphere of much of the film why does it have such a seemingly inappropriate temptation to bring it back into a darkish, but pat conclusion ? And yet despite all this questioning the film is a near masterpiece, and to return to things French it was like watching some of the frozenly beautiful lines of poetry by Mallarme and ending up with a lesser poet. But please find this film and marvel at the sheer originality of it, and its daring to confuse and yet enrich the heart and the mind. A reluctant 8.

Very shaky and obscured imagery can be simply frustrating and distracting, but not in the case of this mesmerising film by Grandrieux.

From the very first second we are thrown into an intense isolated (in more ways than one) world of darkness, snow and impenetrable forests from which the characters and viewer will have a problem escaping from.

I wont talk about the plot itself, which is very minimal and not really that complex, although due to the nature of the films form (minimal dialogue and focus on purely audio/visual story telling) the overall "plot" can seem rather obscured. Grandrieux wants to attack your senses directly and has no desire to tell a traditional narrative story, so just immerse yourself in his world and all should be clear (!?!) by the time the lights come back up.

Grandrieuxs aim seems clearly to be the total immersion of the viewer, and in his skillful hands we experience 2nd hand what the main character Alexi sees, hears and feels when at one with his work, his horse and the world around him. This film has some of the strongest single images I've ever seen in a film. The images of the close ups of the horse in its barn, breathing through the darkness and also Alexi running with the horse and his sister through the snow come to mind in particular.

To go back to the first image, I've hardly ever been so instantly arrested by a films total visual and audio output. Just make sure you see this in a dark dark cinema (as Grandrieux wants us to according to his interview at the London Film Festival 08). If you HAVE to see it at home, before it starts make sure the volumes up and the curtain well closed.

Just saw Philip Grandieux's Un Lac (A Lake) over my quest to discover the usage of landscape, time in cinema. In order to explain Un Lac and to describe it is a enormous task. firstly, it was unlike any french movie, bordering on the french extremism, yet it is totally different from the counterparts of Noe, Brisseau, Dumont etc. Having a fairly simple plot, of a epilepsy suffering boy and his family welcome a lumberjack from outside to stay over and cut woods in the harsh climatic Alps. The film has a certain dark integrity to it, yet there is no anything deeply having an ultra shocking effect or anything which can upset the viewer. The film possesses some sort of ambiguous moral ambiguity and the narrative pattern is not so easy to digest. Grandieux's use of the mise-en-scene and the 'excessively' in-motion close ups with the camera itself is a way to thrust the audience into the lives of the mountain lumberjacks. His differing ways of suggesting isolation provide one more example both of how he can seemingly get any effect that he wants and of how he doesn't integrate them. Through out a morally ambiguous shadow play occurs if I may say so.Silence and intensity pervade the white mountains and black, scintillating lake, shot in color, yet naturally very black and white, giving the sense of bitter cold and stark desperation. we never get to see the house from the exterior. Inside it only darkness is prevalent and the only light available makes it quite hard to distinguish one person from the other. When the Hege sister of Alexi sings out (whic is the only song or music of any kind in the movie), Alexi remarks "Your voice doesn't sound the same. Your singing isn't pure" a certain snide of morality is passed as Hege elopes with the outsider Jurgen. Then there is the ghoulish and stern looking father Christiann whose arrival is anonymous. Grandieux delivers leaps over so that part remains unknown as to what relation the father had or from where he comes. His presence adds a very serious tone almost as pitch black as the interiors of the house. Certain elements also dictate that Grandieux may have been following Bresson's Notes on cinematography and merely the actors are models in cruel whether enacting without motives. 'Motive' that maybe the only thing missing here. The film ended beautifully with the sister Hege leaving with Jurgen by the lake. Leaving behind her elliptical brother, her blind mother and the agonizing whether behind. Though not a matter of judgement but yet the situation demands judgement even without flinching as to her abandonment of her family for a stranger. But the big question was when the film ended was that what made them choose such a penancing life in the first place ?