Just a little heads up about a couple of pieces I wrote related to Alain Guiraudie’s terrific, unsettling thriller Stranger by the Lake, a naturalistic and intoxicating tale of sex and murder at a French lakeside cruising spot that was released in the UK this weekend.
For Sight & Sound, I reviewed it as one of the films of the month. And for the Guardian, I used it – along with Xavier Dolan’s forthcoming Tom at the Farm – as the peg for a piece about movies that take LGBT characters out of the city. (Spoiler alert: nice things don’t happen as often as nasty things.)
Here’s the opening paragraph of the feature, which, as a couple of commenters didn’t quite clock, is somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
Gay people and the city have been a good match since Sodom and Gomorrah. From the molly houses of 18th-century London to 1970s San Francisco via prewar Berlin, the urban environment has always been the natural habitat of queer culture – a place where LGBT people can set their own rules, form their own families, be anonymous when they want to and find company when they fancy it. The countryside, on the other hand, is the place they escape from – a realm of social conformity with limited opportunities for culture, sex or socialising, and perhaps even a site of danger.
You can read the whole thing here.
And here’s the opening paragraph of the review, which is pretty spoilery.
There can be something quite awful about the sun on the water. The sparkle and dazzle of the light as it plays across the ever-changing surface of the depths – there’s beauty there, of course, but also power, danger and unaccountability, the coming together of forces massively indifferent to human pleasure, malice, ecstasy or destruction. So bright. So deep. So easy to lose one’s bearings or, having slid beneath the waves, to seem never to have been there at all. An ideal setting for sex or killing.
You can read the whole thing here.
