Director knows how to make typical movie interesting

Starring Pierre Deladonchamps, Patrick d'Assumcau and Christophe Paou. Directed by Alain Guiraudie.

Unrated. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Bottom line: Beneath surface originality, it's typical.

By Mick LaSalle

San Francisco Gate

As an example of what you can do with a camera and little money, the French film “Stranger by the Lake” is impressive. It takes place entirely in a single location — a small, rocky line of shore by a lake, next to a small woods area and a parking lot.

What Director Alain Guiraudie doesn’t have is a particularly gripping story to tell, though, for a time, he makes up for it with a charismatic leading man, some arresting characters and an unusual setting.

The setting is a cruising spot for gay sunbathers. Guys show up, get nude, and get into casual conversations with their appendages hanging out there like silent witnesses. Here and there, we might see some swimming, but sooner or later most of the men pair off into the nearby woods, which are as full of activity as London’s notorious St. James Park in the Restoration era. Nothing like trees and shrubbery to bring on amorous behavior.

Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a genial, self-possessed but rather rudderless young man, hangs out at the lake every day, where he strikes up a platonic friendship with Henri (Patrick d’Assumcau), a lonely, depressive man twice his age. The conversations between Franck and Henri — terse, but full of unstated longing — constitute some of the best acted and most skillfully written parts of the film.

But movies must go somewhere, plots must always kick in, and when this one does, that’s where “Stranger by the Lake” begins to contract into something less creative than its odd setting and compelling compositions would suggest. Beneath a surface originality, the film reveals itself as something typical.

Still, Guiraudie knows how to make movies. So when, for example, Franck witnesses a murder, the camera never moves in to show us the murder from a close, clear viewpoint. Rather, it shows us what Franck sees, which is exactly what Hitchcock would have done. The only difference is Hitchcock wouldn’t have filmed “Stranger by the Lake” without a slightly better screenplay.

Also, Hitchcock never would have been able to convince James Stewart to take his clothes off. The frontal male nudity here is ubiquitous, and the sex scenes are explicit. “Stranger by the Lake” has no rating, but if it had, it would earn an NC-17 ten times over.