A Straight Film Critic Reacts To A Very Gay Film – “Strangers By The Lake”
For Pride Month, a straight critic sat down with the gayest film he could find and walked away a fan. At The Film Experience, critic Ben Miller opened the blog’s “Very Gay Film/Very Straight Guy” series with Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, the 2013 French thriller set at a lakeside cruising spot.
Rather than reach for something safe like Brokeback Mountain or Moonlight, he went for the deep end. His verdict, in short: if you can handle what’s on screen, the film pays you back. We’re inclined to agree.
The gayest film he could find
Stranger by the Lake does not ease anyone in. Guiraudie shoots a sun-baked French cruising beach with full-frontal nudity, unsimulated sex and a cast of men who exist, as Miller puts it, to “experience gay pleasure.”
He calls it “the gayest possible movie but played without an ounce of camp,” then treats it as a “litmus test for how straight people can handle gay content.” Guiraudie makes no effort to court a straight audience, and Miller finds that refusal admirable.
A litmus test, not a provocation
His sharpest point is that the explicit material is not there to shock. “Guiraudie is not Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noé,” Miller writes. The nudity, he reckons, stops reading as explicit after about half an hour.
What is left is a noir built on a single location, no musical score, and a real question underneath: what draws us to danger, and what do we actually want from a partner. Franck, played by Pierre Deladonchamps, keeps returning to the lake even as the threat sharpens.
Why he is right
Miller lands on a line worth repeating. “If you can get past the film’s explicit nature, you will find yourself well-rewarded.” He is right. The film took Best Director in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes in 2013, along with the festival’s Queer Palm, and Deladonchamps won Most Promising Actor at the Césars.
The craft was never in doubt. Have you seen it yet? If not, Miller’s review is a fair place to start.
