Strangers by Lakes: 1 or 2 or 4 or 5 or 10

As for the Silurus, a cut-throat hee is wheresoever hee goeth, a great devourer, and maketh foule worke: for no living creatures come amisse unto him, he setteth upon all indifferently.

—Pliny, Historie of the World (Naturalis Historia)

The first thing is there is a disagreement about a word. Later, a disagreement about a length. They amount to the same quarrel.

Toward the beginning of a conversation in Cinema Scope between the Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues and Alain Guiraudie, director of the 2013 L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake), speaking of the rigid, reductive formality of Guiraudie's film—which takes place over ten days in a radically confined setting within a rigorously plotted order of shots of the limited register and reach of a parking lot, a lake, its shore (itself invisibly partitioned into zones for cruising and for amity), an adjacent forest for watching or for fucking—whose boundaries collectively function as the restricted ground in which desire and murder play out, a space that is a frame, which is to say both rigid structure and circulation of evidence related to a crime—Rodrigues says of the work, "It's very geometrical." Guiraudie apparently agrees, only to metanoiacally recall or convert this pronouncement. "Yes," the director replies, "very 'scenographic' I'd say."¹

Those two designations are starkly incommensurable. Lit. negation of mensurabilis: they have no common measure. This reading takes place at the site of that nothing-in-common.

L'inconnu du lac focuses on two sets of three figures, distributed by anthropomorphic type. The first begins and ends with the romantic, idealist Franck; his older achingly desired love object Michel; and his corpulent, observant friend Henri, who will ultimately give himself, spatially and catastrophically, over to Michel's violence as a kind of warning sacrifice to Franck. The narrative turns on Franck's immediate and intense desire for Michel, which does not wane when, on the second day of the ten, he covertly watches Michel and his current lover in the titular lake and sees in a spare and dark long shot the disappearance of the second body under the line of the water and the slow reemergence of only Michel to the shore. The subsequent days follow Franck's erotic investment in Michel as it arcs through curiosity, amplification, love, tacking toward ambivalence, fear, and a soft loathing, all while a police inspector makes inquiries to the previously closed community of semianonymous cruisers, their count now down by one. By the end of the film, Michel has murdered both the inspector and Henri, and the light closes on Michel entreating out in the dark for a frightened but still present Franck to return to him—he who never to the end gave up entirely on his desire, never gave Michel over to the police. The film ends with a symmetrical exchange of calls without response: the exhaustion of this first cry of names and Michel's departure from the enclosed stage and then the final minutes, which present in near darkness an ambivalent Franck who wanders the pitch of the woods alone, finally whispering, trying, then baying Michel's name once, then again, again, and again. Franck cries out for the one he wants, which is to say the one he wants nonetheless. (All true wanting takes this form.) These men constitute the central narrative triangle—one that stages opposing models of eros: amor, a destructive, dissymmetrical passion turning on the grammatical opposition between the lover and the beloved, set against the mutuality of philia, the reciprocal goodwill among friends—which is to say structures that play out Platonic versus Aristotelian conceptions of the most ethical form of love.

Alongside this first triad, and composing a symmetrical if markedly other form of relations, there are three nonhuman figures: a corpse, a place, and a fish. More precisely, give this as a corpse, a place, and a measurement. This tripartite structure is not a triangle of desire, as in the amatographic narrative, but a setting in place relations of comparative...