Um Estranho no Lago

Not much to add to the other comments made here, but I'll say that this film was pretty fantastic! It offers a keen inside view of the gay community living and cruising around the lake of the title. All the characters are dead on: the cute guy, the old queens, the pervert etc. with no judgment whatsoever. The pacing can seem long to some, but I quite enjoyed the repetitive installation shots. It mirrored the compulsive visits to the lake the hero makes, in hopes of finding love, even if he himself knows it's a futile quest.

"L'inconnu du lac" screened at the FNC (Festival du Nouveau Cinema) a few weeks ago, where I saw "Interior. Leather Bar." (the James Franco and Travis Mathews doc). I couldn't help but see a connection with some of the stuff Franco discussed. Our objections to porn and graphic sex are mostly constructed by society rather than rooted in any inherently moral reasons. The sex scenes in "L'inconnu du lac" are very graphic but never gratuitous. They expose the mal de vivre of the gay men who visit this beautiful lake better than words could.

This film tells what goes on among the men cruising by a beautiful lake in the summer, somewhere in France.

"Stranger by the Lake" is a single location film, with all scenes happening in or by the lake. The story focuses on a handsome young man who gets attracted to a dangerous man, putting his life at risk. Then, relationships between them, and a solitary man who sits by the lake gets complicated. Though the pacing is pretty slow in the beginning, the paces accelerates at lightning speed towards the end, delivering much thrills that makes people hold their breath. The ending is left open, but scenes just before the film ends are shocking and almost aggravating, evoking much gasps of horror and shouts of exasperation in the cinema.

Together with the highly explicit scenes, "Stranger by the Lake" is quite an thrilling eye opener that tells the truth in a cruising ground, and how love is completely blind.

I enjoyed "Stranger by the Lake" very much on several different levels. It features a compelling story line with plenty of suspense heightened by excellent acting and lovely, sensitive cinematography. However, this picture isn't for the faint of heart, so homophobes and prudes will want to give it a wide berth.

The plot revolves around a series of inexplicable decisions made by Franck, a handsome, 30ish vegetable seller who regularly visits a gay beach and cruising ground. The beach is inhabited by a largely unvarying selection of men who are completely indifferent to their "neighbors" except for one highly specific service that they can, and often do, render one another in the nearby woods. The men exploit and are exploited with a ruthlessness that I found stunning, familiar and sad.

This is a ground-breaking film in at least two ways. First, it is the most explicitly and unapologetically erotic art-house movie since Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses," except that in this case all of the on-screen sex is gay. Second, it is really not a "gay film" in the sense that it is actually a story about human callousness and depravity. In other words, the gay characters and gay sex are almost incidental to the true message being conveyed in this movie: that human beings can be truly, and quite casually, inhuman toward each other. This is in contrast to many other "gay themed" titles where the "gayness" of the story line is the most important element in the film's identity. One could easily make a straight version of "Stranger by the Lake" and it would work equally well. Nonetheless, there is most definitely a certain "je ne sais quoi" in "Stranger by the Lake" that a heterosexual picture would be quite unequipped to deliver upon.

If you like your movies strong, suspenseful, lyrical and sleazy you will want to make a point of seeing "Stranger by the Lake."

A very explicit French gay-themed film. Sometimes it felt a bit overly so - including graphic unsimulated scenes of oral sex and even a shot of a man, erm, climaxing. But I kind of admire the movie at the same time for not shying away from showing anything. The characters are intriguing and the film is beautifully photographed in long, uninterrupted takes and panning shots of the lake setting. The setting itself is one of the best things about the movie. Everything takes place either on the lake or shore surrounding it, in the forest behind the lake, or a car park. You become so accustomed to these settings that everything else outside them seems meaningless - for instance we never see what the main character does for a living, or the supposed 'happy hour' drinks many of the cruising characters in this film attend after a day on the lake. None of that would've been necessary because the film is all about the character's interactions with one another on the beach, anything else would've felt out-of-place. It's a brilliant choice on the part of the director and has an interesting, hard-to-describe effect on the viewer. The film also has a healthy dose of humor (the police inspector is hilarious) and several very intense scenes, especially towards the ending. Recommended, but not for the squeamish or conservative!

There are some thriller tropes here and there, a tiny bit of suspense, but at its core, it's mostly a chronicle, we follow, for a few day, a handful of men cruising by a lac. Some will be taken aback by the highly graphical nature of the movie, but I deeply believe that the point here isn't shock value, but simply the desire to shoot that peculiar microcosm completely untethered, and that, Giraudie (the writer- director) certainly does in spades! Idiots will talked about porn, but this clearly isn't masturbation material, it truly is masterful and heartfelt filmmaking, art in the true sense of the word, but with a lot of fellatio and hand jobs between men! It should speak to all of us, because at its core is the fear of absolute loneliness, even amongst one's kin, and the character of Henri in that respect is quite fascinating. Basically the man is a clam, his mind seems unfathomable, is he looking for a friend, is he looking for a lover? What does he truly want from the protagonist Franck? Who knows? So, to sum it up, don't take your parents to see this film, trust me, but go, you'll thank me later!