{"id":28138,"date":"2013-11-12T07:04:37","date_gmt":"2013-11-12T14:04:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=28138"},"modified":"2013-11-21T14:22:36","modified_gmt":"2013-11-21T21:22:36","slug":"stranger-at-the-lake-the-other-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=28138","title":{"rendered":"Stranger by the Lake & The Other Son"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Stranger<\/a>
Stranger by the Lake<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For all sorts of reasons, Stranger by the Lake<\/em> will not be everyone\u2019s cup of tea. That\u2019s a shame, because it is a willfully unsettling, quite disturbing meditation about the mores and morals allowed to evolve in a vacuum. What one needs to keep in mind is that it is a bit short on plot: there is a story of sorts, an erotic murder-mystery, but because we know the whodunit from the start, the one thing that holds our attention from this perspective is the whydunit, which is a pretty enigmatic consideration. Not that this spoils the film, far from it.<\/p>\n

A secluded lake is a cruising spot for homosexual men. It could be anywhere, and the patrons could be \u2013\u00a0 in a manner of speaking are, given their anonymity \u2013 anyone. A protocol of propositioning evolves, matter of fact and consummated in near-by bushes. There are hints of relationships not based on immediate sexual attraction, of a life that extends beyond the lake, but not much more than that. The lake is a self-contained microcosm of erotic engagement, and little more beyond.<\/p>\n

Franck, lithe and lissome and personable, strikes up a friendship with the bulky and morose Henri, who comes to the lake each day but stays apart from the fray. Henri says that he is not gay. He\u2019s messed about with men, true.\u00a0 But as far as he is concerned, the number of men who are truly, exclusively homosexual are very small indeed, and he\u2019s certainly not one of them. He\u2019s just split up with his girl. It\u2019s his holiday from work. And that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

Franck has eyes for Michel, but Michel is taken. C\u2019est la vie. Then late one night, there is a murder and Franck is the only witness. He doesn\u2019t talk: everyday life, such as it is, continues uninterrupted. But the event draws Franck and Michel and Henri into a grim, only partially consummated menage-a-trois. The murder hangs over their heads, a grim cloud that breaks when the police come nosing about and interfering with the lake\u2019s own natural order of things.<\/p>\n

Stranger by the Lake<\/em>, a winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival, invests a great deal in establishing a sense of place and time rather the conventionalities of plot and, up to a point, characterization. It is almost an hour before we know the name of any of the principals at all; there are almost no external reference points that one can orient oneself by. The pastoral calm by the lake is disturbed not by the sex (there is a lot of it) but rather by the oblique touches that emphasize the apartness, the disconnect, that the habitu\u00e9s seem to value.<\/p>\n

When a police inspector, trying to get to the bottom of the murder, accuses Franck \u2013 and by extension, the whole community, such as it is \u2013 of valuing the simulacrum of normality, their freedom over the death of \u201cone of (their) own,\u201d it is rather uncomfortable to acknowledge that he has a point. And more uncomfortable, by this point, to understand why they might want it so. Stranger by the Lake<\/em>, emotionally abbreviated though it is, is an unsettling film.<\/p>\n

Generally, the simplest taxonomy of cinema is to split films into those concerned with evoking\u00a0 mood and those that try to tell a story. Strangers by the Lake<\/em> is very much of the first category. The Other Son<\/em>, on the other hand, firmly and with foresight places itself within the latter. It sticks very much to crafting a particular type of\u00a0 narrative, even at the expense of leaving unexplored less tangible but possibly more rewarding attitudes untested.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Other Son<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The story of children swapped at birth is old as the hills. The topical twist here is that the hills in question are the Judean hills, the two protagonists 18 year olds on the two sides of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian divide: Joseph, the son of a career army officer looking forward to military service in the Air Force and Yassin, from modest surroundings in the West Bank but fortunate enough to have secured a scholarship to study in Paris.<\/p>\n

Writer\/director Lorraine Levy makes the very conscious decision from the start to concentrate on the human aspect of the story, on the consequences for the two boys (Jules Sitruk and Mehdi Debhi) and their families after the mix-up is discovered. The narrative is solid rather than spectacular, and contains few surprises: the two mothers, played by Emmanuelle Devos and Areen Omari, try to find ways to build bridges between the two families whose destinies have been linked by fate. There is palpable anxiety of what the respective social milieus will make of the swap, once the secret is out; the two fathers (Pascal Elbe and Khalifa Natour) glower at each other rather ineffectually. The Other Son<\/em> negotiates the trickier aspects of the dysfunctional relationship between Israel and Palestine plausibly, the necessity of clich\u00e9 only slightly veering into stereotype. It isn\u2019t sugar coated kumbaya stuff at all, but it isn\u2019t terribly political either. But that isn\u2019t actually a bad thing, come to think of it. I do think it is telling though that in their own way, neither Joseph nor Yassin saw their future as being particularly rooted in mainstream Palestine and Israel, even before the complications of identity arose. Even so, it is a hopeful \u2013 if not wholly optimistic \u2013 film, which does what it sets out to do competently. I happen to think that exploring the mise en scene that feeds into such a perplexing state of affairs \u2013 what does it mean to be a Jew, for instance, or a Palestinian \u2013 might have made for a more interesting, if less complete film. But as a work of story-telling fiction, it is sound enough.<\/p>\n

Stranger by the Lake<\/em> (2013)
\nWritten and Directed by Alain Guiraudie
\nStarring Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d\u2019Assumcao
\n100 minutes, French with Hebrew and English subtitles<\/p>\n

The Other Son<\/em>
\nWritten and Directed by Lorraine Levy
\nStarring Emmanuelle Devos, Pascal Elbe, Mehdi Debhi, Aneen Omari, Jules Sitruk, Khalifa Natour
\n105 minutes, French, Hebrew, Arabic and English with Hebrew and English subtitles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For all sorts of reasons, Stranger by the Lake will not be everyone\u2019s cup of tea. That\u2019s a shame, because it is a willfully unsettling, quite disturbing meditation about the mores and morals allowed to evolve in a vacuum. What one needs to keep in mind is that it is a bit short on plot: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}