Film Carew: Mystery Road, Stranger By The Lake

Mystery Road takes place, for a stretch, on its titular strip of dirt track; and though its murder-mystery procedural is largely set on open expanses of outback highway, the film has a more symbolically-named totem lurking nearby: Massacre Creek. At first, that piece of writing - by filmmaker Ivan Sen, one of local cinema's more interesting artists - seems heavy-handed, until you stop to think that there probably is a real Massacre Creek out there, somewhere; a snaking trickle in the midst of some thankless red-dirt expanse, blithely naming the bloodshed that's barely buried in Australia's colonialist history.

Sen's story is set at some unnamed rural outpost, a modern-day site of the same age-old cultural clash; in which the rusted frames of decaying cars dot the desert like old skeletons and the howl of wild dogs echoes day and night. Mystery Road employs creaky tropes of genre - the cop returning to the town they left behind; the small-town murder investigation at the end-of-the-world; the policier's run of bribed informers and crooked-cop revelations - with an auteurist eye (and, in a recurring overhead device, the eye-of-god) and a social-political spirit (the less-than-urgent investigations of dead black girls yet another cultural shame of life on a stolen continent). Tales of savages lives on savage lands aren't new to Australian cinema - when a character pronounces “welcome to hell,” the line feels pre-worn - nor are portraits of self-destructive aboriginal communities and deep-seated rural racism (“they deserve everything they get”).

And now Hugo's posing...

But Sen's great dramatic device is merely making his investigating detective a black man (Aaron Pedersen). It sounds simple, but it's infinitely complex, and situates the audience not on either side of the divide, but in the middle of the conflict. “We usually shoot black fellas,” glowers Ryan Kwanten, relishing a villainous turn as a roo-shootin' landowner's-son guarding his property with a sneer; “we kill coppers, bro,” pronounces one indigenous delinquent, with an air of both innocence and menace, a reflective echo from the other side. Pedersen is a man between worlds: an upwardly-mobile turncoat whose job requires locking up his own, but who is, in the greater scheme of things, powerless; a cuckolded dick whose authority only goes as far as whatever white man's standing behind him.

As Pedersen progresses through this procedural, each witness is less threatened, more dismissive, more defensive than the last; his foiled, failed attempts to 'do good' lingering broadly symbolic. “Do you think you can really make a difference in this place?” he's asked, mockingly, and the question hits home, for both character and audience: his failure our failure. Mystery Road may bow down to genre convention and end things with an everyone-who-deserves-it-gets-killed shootout, but there's no sense that anything has been solved, that a difference has really been made. The racial tension here is dramatised, but the malaise is real: the kids on the mission, bereft of hope, keen to obliterate reality with “drugs and grog”; the powers-that-be happy to maintain the status-quo. It's a film set in a perpetual warzone, where there's no hope for a peace-process.

If you've heard only one thing about Alain Guiraudie's Stranger By The Lake, it's likely that the film features unsimulated gay-sex, and was, thus, under scrunity by local censors. But though the film is an unending portrait of naked bodies —the male form presented, largely, in flaccid banality— there's very little actual fucking; in fact, save for a spurt of bona fide ejaculate, it almost has a chaste quality. Guiraudie's picture is less about fucking than the prospect of it; about the rituals that people willingly submit themselves to in pursuit of pleasure, and the risks that come along with it. It's set in some pre-Grindr, pre-camming remnant of the recent past; where, at a rural French lake, gay men cruise a nude beach, then retreat to the woods for sex. It's both anonymous and not; looking at men drawn to dwelling on the fringes of the fringes, who become their own kind of community, with their own community values. When 'one of their own' is killed, the investigating officer (Jérôme Chappatt) can't believe that most men therein keep quiet, honourbound to the beat's own idiosyncratic codes-of-conduct. In the middle of this is Franck (Pierre de Ladonchamps), who's so attracted to the killer (Christophe Paou, a vision of '80s Tom Selleck) that he has his own reasons for staying mum; much to the dismay of the affable, elder 'watcher' (Patrick d'Assumçao) with whom he's struck up a friendship.

De Ladonchamps and d'Assumçao become friends away from the lake, but Guiraudie never shows this; keeping anything that happens away from his singular location purposefully far from frame; preserving the picture's world by keeping it sacrosanct. Whilst its gay-killer-thriller tropes can only summon William Friedkin's lurid Cruising, Stranger By The Lake exists at the opposite end of the auteurist spectrum. It's a piece of precisely-controlled formalism, told almost entirely in long-take long shots; its parade of naked men mortal figures dotting a rocky landscape. Guiraudie repeats the same sequence of shots over and over: cars arriving in the parking lot at morning, the stony beach shot from afar, de Ladonchamps tiptoeing between possible trysts and conversations with d'Assumçao, alighting into the woods, then cars departing come nightfall. But with each passing day, the tension palpably mounts; the self-destructive nature to de Ladonchamps' 'fatal attraction' the thriller's eternal dangerous-game writ as minimalist art-piece. Watching it, Guiraudie's film seems so disengaged from these genre elements that you wonder how Stranger By The Lake will build to a climax (so to speak), but it proves an unfounded fear: the film finishes with one of 2013's great closing shots, a brilliantly-judged ending that allows it mise-en-scène to linger long after the credits have rolled.