Director: Alan Guiraudie

Stars: Felix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jacques Develay, Jean-Baptiste Durand, David Ayala

Shades of Chabrol but with a more absurdist streak in the latest from French genre tweaker Guiraudie, writer-director of singular thriller, ‘Stranger by the Lake’. It begins with Jérémie (Kysyl) a soft-spoken, good-looking thirtysomething arriving in Saint-Martial, the small town where he grew up to attend the funeral of Jean-Pierre, the baker he used to work for. His old friend and Pierre’s son Vincent (Durand) acts cool and wearily to his old friend. Vincent’s mother, widow Martine (Frot) is more welcoming, and insists that Jérémie stays in the old room above the bakery. Vincent suspects that Jérémie may have designs on his mother. There is also a suggestion that Jérémie may have had some sort of complicated relationship with Vincent’s late father. Even Vincent’s aggression hints at some sort of homoerotic attraction to the returnee. Also in the bizarre mix is a seemingly clueless pair of cops that investigate a dramatic incident that occurs midway, the local recluse Walter (Ayala) who Jérémie takes a shine to, and most memorably, the local priest Father Grisolles, played by a gloriously, blithely deadpan Develay. The no fuss direction and cinematography drolly belie this offbeat and unpredictable look at small town rural French life and its attendant longings and repressions. There is humour too in the increasingly bizarre situations that present themselves to the passive-seeming protagonist.

David Willoughby

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