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• Now the Night Begins - 2018 Semiotext(e), https://smile.amazon.com/Night-Begins-Semiotext-Native-Agents/dp/1635900050/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527651121&sr=8-1&keywords=Guiraudie%2C+Alain

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  Alain Guiraudie is a French film director, screenwriter, and novelist. His films include Staying Vertical (2016), Stranger by the Lake (2013), and The King of Escape (2009).

• Bomb Magazine - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/alain-guiraudie/

  QUOTED: "It was very, very difficult both to watch and direct Stranger by the Lake—because by directing sex scenes, you call on your own private life and memories, at least if you want to go off the beaten track and avoid filming academically, with the woman on top of the man and lots of close-ups."
  "On the one hand I was attempting to get as close as possible to reality and represent what takes place there, including its final taboos. At the same time there was something restraining me. It was hard to open myself up. These are complicated things, after all."
  "My great satisfaction about this adventure is that people respond to this film as a film about passion and love and not a film about homosexuality, which is not the film’s theme. I believed that could be done even by showing a very particular sexuality, one that is both highly marginal and singular—because the world I describe is a singular one even within the gay world. Not every homosexual goes to nude cruising beaches!"
  "I was persuaded that the two extremes could be joined, that I could be universal by being very specific and local and even by taking my own thing as a starting point. That interested me ethically, politically, and aesthetically."

  Alain Guiraudie by Nicholas Elliott

  Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
  Jan 21, 2014

  Interview
  Film

  Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne by Liza Béar
  Dardenne Brothers 01
  Strangerbythelake 5 Christophe Paou Pierre Deladonchamps

  I spoke with French director Alain Guiraudie in anticipation of the US release of his much-acclaimed fourth feature Stranger by the Lake, a stunningly beautiful exploration of romance pushed to extremes of sex and death. If it didn’t take place on a gay cruising beach in the south of France and in the nearby woods where the men go to have sex, you might think it had been directed by Robert Bresson in an unusually sunny mood. The film hones in on the unusual triangle between Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a young gay vacationer, Michel (Christophe Paou), a beautiful gay swimmer, and Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), a portly straight man who hangs out at the edge of the beach.

  Stranger by the Lake was a surprise box office hit in France, but few in the know were shocked that Guiraudie had delivered a masterpiece. A director for over twenty years, long acclaimed by no less an authority than Jean-Luc Godard, Guiraudie has now reached that level of mastery in which nothing inessential clutters the frame. Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to marvel at in his previous releases, which remain undistributed in the US. Luckily, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be presenting a full retrospective of Guiraudie’s work from January 24th to 30th, with the director in attendance on opening weekend.

  Interview translated from French by Nicholas Elliott.

  Nicholas Elliott Stranger by the Lake is your fourth feature. Your previous films had a fanciful relationship to sexuality—particularly homosexuality—but this is the first time you really show sex between two men. What brought you to do that now?

  Alain Guiraudie It’s been a slow progression toward the representation of the sex act and sexuality. Even just sexuality in-and-of itself, I had never faced the question of what it meant to get someone in your skin, to be with someone and make love to someone. Even my previous feature, King of Escape, had a kind of modesty, which had to do with the humor in that film.

  I think we have a lot of trouble with sex because it scares the shit out of us. Whether you’re watching it or actually doing it, there is a terror of sex, because that’s what made us—even between men, despite the fact that it’s disconnected from reproduction. It was very, very difficult both to watch and direct Stranger by the Lake—because by directing sex scenes, you call on your own private life and memories, at least if you want to go off the beaten track and avoid filming academically, with the woman on top of the man and lots of close-ups.

  On the one hand I was attempting to get as close as possible to reality and represent what takes place there, including its final taboos. At the same time there was something restraining me. It was hard to open myself up. These are complicated things, after all.

  NE I like the fact that you answered my question not by talking about showing homosexuality, but sexuality in general, which is interesting in relation to this point in social history and to the fact that in France, for instance, the film was a real art house hit. It’s as if people—or some people—were ready to see a movie about sex without worrying whether it’s their own sexual identity or values being represented.

  You’re known for traveling a great deal to present your films, so I assume you have a sense of your audience. Can you tell me what heterosexual audiences’ response has been?

  AG My great satisfaction about this adventure is that people respond to this film as a film about passion and love and not a film about homosexuality, which is not the film’s theme. I believed that could be done even by showing a very particular sexuality, one that is both highly marginal and singular—because the world I describe is a singular one even within the gay world. Not every homosexual goes to nude cruising beaches! I was persuaded that the two extremes could be joined, that I could be universal by being very specific and local and even by taking my own thing as a starting point. That interested me ethically, politically, and aesthetically. Especially politically. I’ve always said that it really comes down to mixing my small personal history, my small personal concerns, with the overarching history of cinema and the world.

  The audiences are not really gay audiences. Of course, there are homosexuals in the theater, but I would say it’s an “all-audiences” film. (laughter)

  It really is surprising how you speak best to others by speaking of what is closest to you. I never experienced it to this extent before and I really wasn’t sure I would pull it off!

  NE While the film isn’t about homosexuality, it does raise certain worrisome questions regarding the gay community. A young gay guy dies—he gets killed—and his belongings stay on the beach for days and no one really cares. People keep fucking. The inspector investigating the crime says to one of the guys cruising: “You have a strange way of loving each other. One of yours gets murdered and you keep fucking.” “Yours” to me implies an army or a race …

  AG Absolutely!

  NE So I have to wonder whether you’re trying to send a message to the gay community or simply showing the state of things?

  AG I really wanted to call into question some things that are inherent to the gay community, but also to any community. It was important for me to question the very notion of community. Do a dozen guys who have a common interest—namely nude sun-tanning on a beach and having sex in the nearby woods—make up a community? It’s funny that the inspector who speaks about community is the one who would like to see some solidarity in the community. When I wrote that character’s long, guilt-inducing tirade, I was steeped in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. For a few years now, I’ve been thinking about the fact that there were Jewish Kapos, which speaks to the idea of community and solidarity within that community. Now, I’m talking about the Jewish community during the Holocaust, but it also relates to the human community. I see plenty of guys dying on the street and I’m not that outraged about it!

  Do I really have empathy for a guy because he goes nude cruising on a beach the way I do? Does that mean I’m obligated to show solidarity to him? I’m not sure.

  The gay community is not something I believe in as such. There are multiple gay communities. When you’re in the Marais, in Paris, there is a common culture, which is related to the night, to techno, and the way people dress. But I also know homosexuals who feel very removed from that, from what’s known as “gaytitude” in France. I don’t feel that close to it myself. It was more of a matter, in this film, of questioning things that are taken for granted.
  Director Alain Guiraudie

  Alain Guiraudie. Courtesy of Strand Releasing.

  NE There’s a comment about consumerism in the film, in that a body can disappear and nobody really cares. That comment is also in the early shot of several bodies intermingled in the woods, in which the individuals are practically unrecognizable.

  AG Yes. That’s exactly how I conceived Michel, the hero—I mean, not the hero …

  NE The murderer.

  AG The bad guy. I conceived him as someone who was both very attractive and really scary, an ultra-free-market pleasure-seeker who takes his pleasure and disposes of its object once he has consumed it. But, in this case, he is also capable of falling in love. That’s where things get delicate.

  This behavior is very much associated with the gay community, but I have the feeling that this consumerist relationship to sex really comes from the ’70s and ’80s. It’s what we eventually made of sexual liberation: a society where you have to orgasm as much as possible, consume sex, and that’s that—end of story. I made this film in the image of sexual liberation as I experienced it, which was something I thought of as highly emancipatory and which has finally come to mean that whoever doesn’t orgasm today is the ultimate loser. We live in a society that pushes us to take pleasure, that forces us to take pleasure, and sometimes, taking pleasure can be as banal as going to the supermarket.

  NE Your statements are quite critical, but in Stranger by the Lake we see love that is strictly connected to the sex act.

  AG I’m critical, but at the same time I wanted to make a real romantic movie, a film in which people go all the way and in which I think they are right to go all the way and morality disappears into the background. On top of that, the reason it was so important for me to show sex head-on, and even to show the actual sex act, was because I wanted to combine functioning sexual organs—which we generally categorize as dirty or pornographic—with great surges of passion and intense lovers’ embraces. That tends to be separated in cinema. It was also political to connect those two aspects.

  I’m really asking myself questions: What has become of all these hedonistic places where one is very free? Or what will they become? In the US and in London—especially in English-speaking countries—people say that the cruising system I show in the film no longer exists. Now it’s Grindr and cruising online. It’s like a supermarket: you choose the type of guy you want, who isn’t too far away and can be there in five minutes. I use that too. But there was something about love in the outdoors which was very hedonistic. That has now sunken into something I find less fun, something that isn’t based so much on seduction, on a real encounter.

  NE As far as romanticism goes, Franck goes all the way: to be with the man he falls in love with he is prepared to be with someone who could kill him and is a liar. It’s a representation of romanticism as the loss of self.

  AG Absolutely. I’m quite attached to the romantic tradition—with the risk of losing yourself. In the romantic tradition, there’s the idea that you go all the way with the other—including into transgression—all the way to the end, and that nothing can stop desire. That was the idea: to trap my protagonist between the great moral questions and his desire. Where will one stop?

  NE When you write, do you see the shots? The drowning scene, for instance, is very precise: it’s filmed in a single shot, framed very wide. To what extent do you see that when you write?

  AG That was very precise. Very quickly, I saw it from a distance and from a single point of view, Franck’s. I never considered changing points of view.

  I really worked on and played with Franck’s point of view and the point of view of the mise en scène. In the drowning shot, the point of view shifts, and I like that a whole lot. We start with Franck’s point of view and then we quietly shift to a more objective POV and then later we come back to Franck’s POV. That’s something I only discovered while editing though I always saw it wide, with the guys in the distance, without a long lens, and from Franck’s POV.

  NE Something that touches me about the film is that it is nearly as much about friendship as it is about love, through the relationship between Franck and Henri. And in fact there are two strangers by the lake. There’s Michel—who we ultimately do know because we know he’s the murderer—whereas Henri remains a very mysterious character because we know nothing about him other than what he says, and we have no idea what this allegedly straight man is doing at the lake. I love that ambiguity.

  AG And it’s totally possible that what Henri says isn’t true!

  NE Especially since we know there are other liars on the beach.

  AG Exactly. There are a lot of liars. For me, the relationship between Franck and Henri is also a love story. It goes beyond a friendship. It was important to me to have a counterpoint to the hypersexual relationship, a relationship that is more controlled and where we take the time to ask ourselves how we respond to another person’s body: that it might go less quickly or that things might not even happen at all. That you might never take the plunge. In my mind, Henri is not gay—I always treated him as a character who isn’t gay—but who is there out of curiosity, to talk to people, and who may be asking himself some questions. I liked the idea of constructing a love story without sex.

  NE So, on the one hand you have a love story that’s purely sexual and on the other a love story with no sex at all.

  AG But with a genuine romantic gesture on Henri’s part at the end. A kind of suicide/sacrifice that is really neither one nor the other—or both at once—but is in any case a romantic gesture.

  NE One of the great moments in the film comes immediately after Henri goes to tell Michel that he knows he’s the murderer and Henri turns back to look at Michel as he’s about to enter the woods. It’s a moment of total ambiguity. Henri could be turning back because he wants to fuck Michel or to lure him into the woods to kill him or—as it turns out—for yet another reason.

  AG I set up the whole sequence to play on that ambiguity. When Franck finds them in the bushes, we can’t tell if it’s a love scene or a fight. The ambiguity was important.

  NE Another interesting thing about Henri, but also about the inspector, is that the place transforms the individual. Once the character is beside that lake, on some level he becomes a homosexual. For example, when the inspector first appears, he comes out of the bushes like a voyeur, much like the character who is always appearing to watch other guys make love.

  I also noticed that both Henri and the inspector hold their bodies in a way that makes it appear like they are restraining themselves—Henri with his arms folded over his chest, the inspector with his hands joined behind his back. Were you conscious of that or is it a beautiful accident?

  AG It’s a beautiful accident. I liked Henri’s position, I liked the inspector’s somewhat suspicious side, but I hadn’t picked up on the idea that it was as if they were restraining themselves.

  NE Well, the other men’s genitals are visible but their bodies are totally relaxed.

  AG Yes, that’s clear. In a way, the inspector is like a witness. He is there to call into question what I—and the characters—consider to be obvious and don’t explain. I’m perfectly aware that for 90% of the audience, this style of cruising is like science fiction, the fact that people could hook up so fast, so simply. With Henri, you’re more in the observer’s position.
  Strangerbythelake 3 Pierre Deladonchamps Patrick D Assum Ao

  Pierre Deladonchamps and Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake. Courtesy of Strand Releasing.

  NE The film was shot entirely outdoors. Yet—or maybe because of this—the lighting is magnificent. Did you film exclusively with natural light or did you add to it?

  AG We shot with available light, more or less, by shooting at the right time of day. I had already really focused on that in the script: the concept of different times of day, time passing. The script included the indications “early afternoon,” “mid-afternoon,” “late afternoon,” “early twilight,” “mid-twilight,” and “late twilight.” Eventually we decided to stick to four states of available light: early afternoon, late afternoon, mid-twilight, and late twilight.

  The idea was to make a film with what the sun gave us. Our work with sound followed the same idea. We took what was available. Of course, there are a few bounce cards here and there, notably for some night scenes, but the lighting department really had next to nothing. For instance, the final sequence, which takes place entirely at nightfall, was shot at the very limit of exposure, which means that we would do two takes per evening throughout the whole shoot. Ultimately, I feel that when you work within the limitations of natural light, your lighting is much richer and you have a greater variety of light than when you work with artificial light. You can’t recreate all the subtleties of the sun’s positions, of late afternoon or twilight light, with artificial light. I decided to work with natural light on this film because I wasn’t at all satisfied with shooting at night on my previous films, whether it was shooting day-for-night or artificially-lit urban nights.

  NE For the sex scenes, you used body doubles, but it isn’t noticeable, whereas it is very obvious in a film like Bruno Dumont’s The Life of Jesus, where there’s an insert—no pun intended—of a penis entering a vagina. From a technical point of view, how did you conceive shooting the sex act?

  AG Dumont is a reference point for me. He’s very important to me. In The Life of Jesus, the porno shot is quite disconnected from the lovers’ embrace. I didn’t want to do the same thing at all—my idea was to make things more fluid between the body doubles and the real actors. From a technical point of view, we basically repeated the choreographies. The actors would do their lovemaking, then we would film the body doubles right away, in the same location and the same light. I also didn’t cast porno actors, I cast normal actors—“normal” actors! (laughter)—actors who were ready to do that and were gay, willing to be body doubles and who looked like the actors.

  NE Did you consider looking for gay actors who would be able to play the lead characters and fully perform the sex scenes?

  AG Yes, of course, we asked actors. But it was no easy task to find a Michel who swam well and was willing to do the sex scenes! At one point I sat down with the actors and we talked about how far I wanted to go with them and how far they were willing to go. That’s something I totally respect. I already had body doubles in the back of my mind so I wasn’t hell-bent on finding actors who would do everything. I wanted to privilege the couple. Anyhow, I think they’re already doing enough.

  NE Absolutely. We believe it. What was the experience like for the actors?

  AG All of it was very rehearsed and very precise in my mind—and for all of us—before we shot. There was no question of manipulating the actors. I told them, “If there’s something you don’t like during the shoot, don’t hesitate to tell me. Even during the edit you have the right to tell me you don’t want something to be in the film.” They didn’t ask me to cut anything. I would hate to have actors who don’t deal with it well later on, particularly since it can still fuck up an actor’s career, despite the fact that people have moved forward regarding that kind of scene. People always say that you have to be careful.

  NE So for the actor, they’re putting at risk not only how they want to be seen but also their career?

  AG Honestly, I think that with a project like mine, an actor’s entourage advises him not to do it. We saw a lot of actors. I didn’t cast the only two who were willing to do it, but I think that an actor who agrees to play a porno scene—featuring non-simulated sex—can destroy his career.

  NE That goes both for gay sex scenes and hetero sex scenes. For instance, Caroline Ducey, who starred in Catherine Breillat’s Romance, has not had the career she might have expected.

  AG Breillat clearly wasn’t very honest, saying that everything really happened, whereas there wasn’t necessarily non-simulated sex. I don’t know how much of that is what messed up her career though, because it’s not like she was blowing up at the time. I should talk to her about it.

  NE How did you position yourself vis-à-vis Breillat, one of the French filmmakers most associated with representing sex, in thinking about your own film?

  AG Romance is kind of the contrary of what I wanted to do. There’s something very cold about the sex in that film. I didn’t want to make a film to turn people off. Sex is joyful and it’s important that sex be joyful, and—even if it leads to a real tragedy—for me, the sex act as such remains a good time. We’re not doing it to hurt ourselves.

  Film Society of Lincoln Center will be presenting a full retrospective of Guiraudie’s work from January 24 to 30. The retrospective will also screen at the Harvard Film Archive January 31 through February 8.

  Nicholas Elliott has been New York correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma since 2009 and is a contributing editor for film at BOMB. His translation (with Alison Dundy) of The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert was published by Harvard University Press in fall 2013.

  sexuality sex mystery french film translation french language community

• IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0347492/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

  Biography
  Showing all 3 items
  Jump to: Overview (1) | Mini Bio (1) | Trivia (1)
  Overview (1)
  Born July 15, 1964 in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Aveyron, France
  Mini Bio (1)

  Alain Guiraudie was born on July 15, 1964 in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Aveyron, France. He is a director and writer, known for Stranger by the Lake (2013), Staying Vertical (2016) and That Old Dream That Moves (2001).
  Trivia (1)
  Member of the jury at the Belfort International Film Festival in 2004.

  Filmography
  Jump to: Director | Writer | Production manager | Actor | Producer | Self
  Hide Hide Director (11 credits)
  2016 Staying Vertical
  2013 Stranger by the Lake
  2009 King of Escape
  2008 C'est votre histoire (TV Series) (1 episode)
  - On m'a volé mon adolescence (2008)
  2005 Time Has Come
  2003 No Rest for the Brave
  2001 That Old Dream That Moves
  2001 Sunshine for the Poor
  1998 La force des choses (Short)
  1994 Straight Ahead Until Morning (Short)
  1990 Les héros sont immortels (Short)
  Hide Hide Writer (10 credits)
  2016 Staying Vertical (screenplay)
  2013 Stranger by the Lake
  2009 King of Escape (screenplay)
  2005 Time Has Come
  2003 No Rest for the Brave (writer)
  2001 That Old Dream That Moves (scenario)
  2001 Sunshine for the Poor
  1998 La force des choses (Short) (written by)
  1994 Straight Ahead Until Morning (Short)
  1990 Les héros sont immortels (Short)
  Hide Hide Production manager (4 credits)
  1999 Les filles de mon pays (Short) (unit production manager)
  1998 La clef des champs (TV Mini-Series) (unit production manager - 2 episodes)
  - Episode #1.2 (1998) ... (unit production manager)
  - Episode #1.1 (1998) ... (unit production manager)
  1997 Le petit frère d'Huguette (Short) (unit production manager)
  1997 Un été aux hirondelles (TV Movie) (unit manager)
  Hide Hide Actor (5 credits)
  2013 Stranger by the Lake
  L'ami de Philippe (uncredited)
  2002 Un petit cas de conscience
  Mario
  2001 Sunshine for the Poor
  Djema Gaouda Lon
  1993 Les yeux au plafond (Short)
  1990 Les héros sont immortels (Short)
  Hide Hide Producer (1 credit)
  2001 Sunshine for the Poor (producer)
  Hide Hide Self (5 credits)
  2017 Tria33 (TV Series)
  Himself - Interviewee
  - Episode #3.93 (2017) ... Himself - Interviewee
  2016 Cinema 3 (TV Series)
  Himself
  - Episode dated 21 May 2016 (2016) ... Himself
  2009-2016 Días de cine (TV Series)
  Himself
  - Episode dated 19 May 2016 (2016) ... Himself
  - Episode dated 26 November 2009 (2009) ... Himself
  2014 La nuit des Césars (TV Series documentary)
  Himself
  - 39ème nuit des Césars (2014) ... Himself
  2009 Cinémas (TV Series)
  Himself
  - Episode dated 5 September 2009 (2009) ... Himself
  Edit
  Personal Details
  Publicity Listings: 1 Article | See more »
  Edit
  Did You Know?
  Trivia: Member of the jury at the Belfort International Film Festival in 2004.

• IndieWire - http://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/alain-guiraudie-interview-staying-verticle-1201769379/

  QUOTED: "It was a pretty classic film, with naked parts. ... So a lot of people who had discovered my work through Stranger By the Lake were disappointed by this one."
  "I’m interested in dreamlike narratives that merge with reality so it becomes difficult to tell which is which. ... You really don’t know if Leo is homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual."
  "I think it has a political connotation to it, like a manifesto. ... By staying vertical, you are, in essence, retaining your humanity. ... It has a sexual connotation, too. That's good, as well."

  Sexual Revolution: France’s Alain Guiraudie On ‘Staying Vertical’ and Why He’ll Never Sell Out
  The director of the festival sensation "Stranger By the Lake" didn't use his sudden popularity to make a more accessible movie.

  Eric Kohn
  Jan 17, 2017 10:25 am
  @erickohn

  “Staying Vertical”

  For nearly 30 years, French director Alain Guiraudie has been developing a daring and transgressive filmography about the travails of modern sexual identity. It wasn’t until 2013, however, that more of the world started to take notice. But the added attention hardly changed his trajectory.

  That was when Guiraudie’s erotic thriller “Stranger By the Lake” shocked crowds in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, with its thrilling and explicit tale of a clandestine gay hookup site that winds up setting the stage for a murder. Guiraudie’s elegant blend of introspective dialogue and jarring sex scenes with stylish genre elements was the talk of Cannes and beyond: It landed him a best director prize at the festival, rave reviews and a global box office take of $1.6 million, a healthy number for such an unorthodox project.

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  READ MORE: Cannes Review: Wacky Gay Sex and a Fear of Wolves Aren’t the Craziest Things About ‘Staying Vertical’

  Guiraudie was suddenly perceived as a major director in one of the world’s cinema capitals.

  Shutterstock
  Alain Guiraudie

  Rather than diving into one of the more mainstream projects suddenly thrust his way, however, Guiraudie saw an opportunity to indulge in even more audacious material.

  “I knew I could be much freer in making my next film,” he said through a translator in an interview last fall, when the results of that effort made its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. The results speak to Guiraudie’s uncompromising approach: “Staying Vertical,” which first screened in competition at Cannes last May, makes “Stranger By the Lake” look downright conventional.

  The new movie is a fascinating cinematic puzzle, in which a wayward filmmaker named Leo (Damien Bonnard) falls in love with a shepherdess in the countryside and fathers a child with her, only to wind up abandoned by her and trapped in the quiet region with a series of eccentric characters. Leo’s ensuing plight finds him intrigued by the relationship between a cranky old man and his much younger roommate who live nearby. Whether or not the men are actually lovers matters less than the way their bond intrigues and possibly even titillates Leo as he’s drawn into a series of sexual adventures riddled with ambiguity. Graphic sex and sudden violence ensue through a series of outrageous twists.

  As Leo searches for his place in this barren landscape, his reality starts to cave in, as it’s increasingly unclear whether he’s imagining the bizarre circumstances that consume him at every turn. Guiraudie described his intentions with the movie as a cross between David Lynch and Luis Buñuel — a far trickier balance than the comparatively straightforward mysteries of “Stranger By the Lake.”

  The director recognized that more conservative viewers had an easier time digesting the Hitchockian thrills of his previous effort, which helped to explain its success. “It was a pretty classic film, with naked parts,” Guiraudie said. “So a lot of people who had discovered my work through ‘Stranger By the Lake’ were disappointed by this one.”

  Setting aside earlier expectations, however, makes “Staying Vertical” entirely engaging on its own terms. Guiraudie’s ambiguous narrative allows him to play marvelously with tone.

  Take, for example, the lengthy sequence in which Leo attempts to console a dying man — and eventually finds himself having sex with the ailing figure in his final moments. The scene unfolds with a peculiar blend of absurdity and poignance. “I was trying to take a moment that’s very emotional and touching while finding the humor in it,” he said, while expressing a desire to find more such bits in his next project. “I think my future lies in black comedy.”

  He relished the opportunity to confuse his audience. “I’m interested in dreamlike narratives that merge with reality so it becomes difficult to tell which is which,” he said, elaborating on the function of that approach in the context of the new film. “You really don’t know if Leo is homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual.” That theme provides a striking contrast with “Stranger By the Lake,” which Guiraudie said “was a film about gay in a very particular time, so I think that those kind of labels don’t really apply to this film.”

  In essence, “Staying Vertical” expands Guiraudie’s ability to explore sexuality by suggesting that it has flexible boundaries.

  Guiraudie’s filmmaking has never been easy to categorize, but he has a fluid style. His queer narratives found a support system on the festival circuit with 2001’s “That Old Dream That Moves,” the puzzling tale of lonely factory workers transfixed by the efforts of a machine worker, which drew acclaim from no less than Jean-Luc Godard. Much in the same way that Godard assails modern society through allusions and narrative trickery, Guiraudie has developed a cogent vision around the disconnect between internal desires and the austere qualities of the world at large. Nothing in his movies is what it seems, which means that anything can happen in service of his themes.

  Among his contemporaries, he said he found a kinship with the likes of fellow Frenchman Bruno Dumont, in addition to Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Harmony Korine, directors committed to original methods of exploring identity. All of them play with the boundaries between reality and dreams to comment on the real world while transcending its limitations.

  stranger by the lake
  “Stranger By the Lake”

  So don’t expect him to sell out any time soon. While Guiraudie received plenty of offers after “Stranger By the Lake” came out, he chose to produce an unorthodox screenplay of his own. “I don’t want to enter into the whole logic of making commercial films,” he said. “I wouldn’t even know how to make them.”

  READ MORE: Like ‘Stranger By The Lake’? Then Check Out The Alain Guiraudie Retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

  Guiraudie’s movies certainly adhere to a logic of their own, and “Staying Vertical” lays out its multifaceted intentions with its title. When presented literally, it refers to the need to stand upright to avoid an attack by wolves, but it also implies a grander kind of psychological resilience. “I think it has a political connotation to it, like a manifesto,” Guiraudie said. “By staying vertical, you are, in essence, retaining your humanity.”

  But as always with this confrontational director, there was a more immediate interpretation at hand as well. “It has a sexual connotation, too,” he said. “That’s good as well.”

  “Staying Vertical” opens in New York and Los Angeles on January 20. A national rollout with follow in the coming weeks.

• Slant - https://www.slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-alain-guiraudie

  Interview: Alain Guiraudie on Stranger by the Lake Comments COMMENTS (0)
  BY R. KURT OSENLUND

  JANUARY 24, 2014

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  Alain Guiraudie’s transcendent Stranger by the Lake is a film that can be shortly synopsized as a summertime cruising thriller, but warrants a book-length treatise on its scary, yet resonant, exploration of carnal and psychological minutia. The story follows a fit Frenchman, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who hits an unnamed beach almost daily and falls for Michel (Christophe Paou), who might be one of the most persuasive “wrong men” in cinema’s history. Michel is a tall, mustachioed dish to whom Franck can’t help but gravitate, going against the advice offered him by his paternal confidant, Henri (Patrick D’Assumçao), and even defying his conscience when he watches Michel murder a former lover. Through Guiraudie’s magnificently visceral technique, which achieves a unification of Franck and the viewer in both perspective and attraction, Stranger by the Lake fearlessly plumbs the dark corners of desire, or as Guiraudie tells it, the limits.

  Meeting me in the Elinor Bunim Munroe Theater at Film Society Lincoln Center, which, starting today, will be showing a retrospective of Guiraudie’s work in celebration of his latest release, the 49-year-old filmmaker opened up about the wide terrain his modestly mounted thriller covers. He spoke of his fixation with the 1970s, his attraction to the mythical, and how Stranger by the Lake, which has stirred up buzz for its virtually unadulterated sex scenes, is ultimately an existential study.

  At times, it’s tempting to read Stranger by the Lake as an allegory for HIV/AIDS, particularly when Franck is warned by a police detective that there’s a “gay killer” in his community. But that assessment feels too simplistic for a film that invites so many readings about desire. Can you say to what degree the fear of HIV/AIDS factored into the crafting of the story?

  The fear of AIDS didn’t really play a role for me in the film, but on the other hand, it’s very important, because AIDS has to be present. It has to be something that hovers over the whole film. Because it was something that, at the time, had profoundly affected our love relationships, and our sexual relationships. So while there wasn’t the fear of it, it was something that was always present for me in the film. And it’s not just homosexual relationships, it’s also heterosexual relationships—both were really changed as a result of AIDS.

  You said “at the time.” Are you referencing when AIDS was more of a dire crisis for the culture, or when your film takes place? Because the film doesn’t seem to be set in any specific time period.

  The film really takes place now, but, as in pretty much all of my films, there’s always a mixture of the present and the 1970s, because that was the period when I grew up. I think the film is also a reflection of this progression of how things changed from the 1970s to the present. Because, in the 1970s, you had a sexual liberation movement in which people felt free—they felt emancipated. Now, in this post-AIDS period, we have a return to a more puritanical way of looking at things—a return to a sort of puritism and conservativism that has turned sexual freedom into a more consumer-type sex. So that element that was present in the 1970s has really changed, and not for the better. We’re seeing a darker approach, where sex is something to be consumed. It doesn’t have that same aura that it had in the 1970s.

  So, this film’s depiction of the raw power of desire—is that your way of responding to, or combating, these shifted views of sexuality?

  [Laughs] Well, I’m not really someone who’s fought hard against consumerism either! I think what I really wanted to do was make a film not just about desire, but our relationship with it, and, more specifically, my relationship with it. And since you mentioned this “raw desire,” I’d like to say that, from a political point of view, one of the things I really wanted to do was to put sex and sexual organs in the forefront of the film. I wanted to show that they are also part of desire and great love. Traditionally, we’ve seen these great love stories in major motion pictures, but none of [those sexual elements] are seen. If we want to see the act of sex and the sexual organs, the only real place has been pornography. So my idea here was to reunite the two—the idea of the tremendous passion, and the great love story, together with the physical side of it.

  I don’t want to get too hung up on the film’s forthright physical acts, but to what extent did the actors actually participate in the sex scenes? Clearly, we see that they’re engaging in some of them, but was there a line that was drawn in terms of how far they would go?

  We used body doubles for the non-simulated sex, and it was something I talked about with the actors a great deal. I wanted to see just how far they were willing to go, and that was just as far as they wanted to go—they didn’t want to actually do it.

  I think the most fascinating thing for me was the way in which Franck seemed more drawn to Michel after witnessing his crime. It made me think of the allure of the illicit and the “forbidden,” no matter its source. Do you think that’s something the queer community can connect to more, given that we’ve historically been trained to believe our desires are wrong?

  I don’t really go along with the idea that, in the gay community, something illicit is going to make it more attractive, because I don’t think that’s any more true there than it is with heterosexuals. And I felt it was very important to show that Franck really wanted Michel before the murder, and that he continued to want him after the crime.

  I guess I’m just thinking that, in relation to my own experience, I went more than half my life being told that my homosexual feelings were wrong. So when I finally submitted to those feelings, defying the learned “wrongness” of them made it that much more liberating. I’m not saying I’d go courting a killer, but there’s something fundamentally relatable about the all-stops-pulled extent of Franck’s desire.

  Well, what I really wanted to do here was to show that Franck is someone who obeys his own desire, and he follows it to the limit. He doesn’t yet know what the limit is, but he’s willing to follow his desire to it. We see Franck questioning himself, we see him concerned, but there’s never a level of excitement because of the danger. I think, in this sense, my point of view is one that’s really very romantic, and I think it’s also something that’s not often shown in films—someone who’s willing to go as far as his desire will take him. That’s really the central question of the film: “Just how far am I willing to go to live and experience what I want, and be satisfied?”

  There’s also something very implicitly mythic about this tale, and this world. It’s almost imperceptible, but there were moments when I thought Michel might be imagined, like when he walks out of the water as if he’s some mythical figure. As a viewer, I’m very glad he’s not imagined, but did you ever consider making those sort of impressions more literal?

  Well, first of all, it gives me a lot of pleasure that you say that. One of the reasons is, as a filmmaker, I really tried to show everyday life as something mythic—to give it a mythic dimension. As far as the character of Michel, I tried to do that with him too, especially in the scene where he comes out of the water. In that scene I was almost treating him like a Greek god who’s come out of the water back to where Franck is sitting. I also think that the actual structure, and the way the film is set up, in that all of the action takes place in one single location, is something that also reflects Greek tragedy. That’s an element I worked hard to show as well.

QUOTED: "deeply disconcerting tale."
"All but the most steely fans of sadistic thrillers will find the novel too aimless and disturbing."

Now the Night Begins
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p59. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Now the Night Begins
Alain Gulraudie, trans. from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Semiotext(e), $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-63590-005-7
French film director Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) focuses on the overlap of violence, power, and rampant sexual desire in his psychologically taxing and deeply disconcerting tale. Forty- year-old Gilles upends a lazy afternoon visit to his neighbors, the 90-something Grampa, his daughter, Mariette, and her teenage granddaughter, Cindy, by taking a sexual fantasy involving Grampa's underwear too far. Before they know Gilles is the culprit, Mariette reports the underwear theft and Gilles becomes the target of gruesome police brutality. As he bumbles through the rest of the summer, making and breaking dates with former lovers and cruising the beach, Gilles struggles with his confusing sexual feelings for Grampa and gives in to Cindy's increasingly brazen advances. In a sudden shift, Gilles witnesses the menacing chief of police drowning a man. The chief attempts to intimidate Gilles and ignites a perplexing all-consuming romance between them, though Gilles worries he only acquiesces to avoid being killed himself. Guiraudie never shies away from any darkness, offering frank, unpleasant descriptions of Gilles's nearly sociopathic desires and dreams but offering little reason for the reader's investment. All but the most steely fans of sadistic thrillers will find the novel too aimless and disturbing. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Now the Night Begins." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 59. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839759/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=20bd6390. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839759
2 of 2 5/29/18, 10:30 PM

• CULTURAL SERVICES FRENCH EMBASSY IN THE UNITED STATES
  http://frenchculture.org/books-and-ideas/7347-french-voices-award-2017-recipients
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  News
  French Voices Award | 2017 Recipients

  Chosen by a 15-member committee from many exceptional texts, The French Voices Award honors translators and American publishers for their commitment to bringing the very best of contemporary French writing to an American audience.

  This year, we have the pleasure of rewarding 13 astonishing texts. While four have secured an American publisher, eight of the selected titles are still available, including the French Voices Award Grand Prize Winner, and the French Voices Award they have been granted is not only a testament to their quality and that of their translation, but also a significant financial incentive for publishers.

  Alain Guiraudie
  NOW THE NIGHT BEGINS
  Jeffrey Zuckerman, Tr., Semiotexte, 2017
  (Ici commence la nuit, P.O.L, 2014)

  Gilles is forty, facing a precarious future with unformed fears and regrets. The one thing that seems solid is Grampa, the ninety-year-old patriarch of a family Gilles has befriended. Gilles grows obsessed by the old man, and a strange sexual bond grows between the two. When the police get involved, and Gilles is witness to a murder, the banality of interhuman violence is brought to a paroxysmal climax. This novel recalls Georges Bataille’s dark surrealism and the unvarnished violence of Bret Easton Ellis.

  “In its way, the most elegant, certainly the most hilarious brief for anarchy that anyone has written in a long time.” – Gary Indiana