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Lo sconosciuto del lago

Stranger By The Lake

Alain Guiraudie

Drama • 2013 • 1h 37m

Lo sconosciuto del lago

Reviewed by Beatrice 27. June 2023

Of eroticism it can be said, first of all, that it is the approval of life until death

A marvelous lake with Caribbean-colored waters and lush vegetation gathers the attendance of nudist men who park themselves in anticipation of picking up and consummating casual and casual sexual encounters.

Knowing little about them, often not even their names, they seem immune to the frenzy of time and space vaguely touches them.

Their cars left nearby punctuate the repetitiveness and monotony of those ever-changing days as do their basic, anonymous attire.

As Frank waits to meet the attractive and disturbing Michel who is entertaining another, he observes something unmentionable.

Only Henry, a plump and disenchanted man, always sits on the sidelines, watching the progress of the days in clothing; a kind of unusual and reflective spectator with whom Frank will enter into friendship.

Eros and Thanatos are the protagonists accompanied by a stranger; a strict realism manages to pack a disorienting and ominously evocative film. The documentary-like repetitiveness of the sexual encounters seems intended to highlight the compulsion to repeat the same actions aimed at exorcising the disorienting loneliness.

The extreme foreignness to oneself is the dimension of the stranger, alien and homologated without one's knowledge.

Only Henry stands by and hints between the lines that homosexuality, before being the specific trait of some men, is the basic structure of male relationships.

The only taboo that remains is that of the relationship dimension defeated for the benefit of casual seduction, and the great unknown is the anthropological maturation that will allow the emergence from the stereotypical masks of women, and in this case men, victims of abysmal boredom and their predictability.

Definitely very interesting.

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