Just saw Philip Grandieux's Un Lac (A Lake) over my quest to discover the usage of landscape, time in cinema. In order to explain Un Lac and to describe it is a enormous task. firstly, it was unlike any french movie, bordering on the french extremism, yet it is totally different from the counterparts of Noe, Brisseau, Dumont etc. Having a fairly simple plot, of a epilepsy suffering boy and his family welcome a lumberjack from outside to stay over and cut woods in the harsh climatic Alps. The film has a certain dark integrity to it, yet there is no anything deeply having an ultra shocking effect or anything which can upset the viewer. The film possesses some sort of ambiguous moral ambiguity and the narrative pattern is not so easy to digest. Grandieux's use of the mise-en-scene and the 'excessively' in-motion close ups with the camera itself is a way to thrust the audience into the lives of the mountain lumberjacks. His differing ways of suggesting isolation provide one more example both of how he can seemingly get any effect that he wants and of how he doesn't integrate them. Through out a morally ambiguous shadow play occurs if I may say so.Silence and intensity pervade the white mountains and black, scintillating lake, shot in color, yet naturally very black and white, giving the sense of bitter cold and stark desperation. we never get to see the house from the exterior. Inside it only darkness is prevalent and the only light available makes it quite hard to distinguish one person from the other. When the Hege sister of Alexi sings out (whic is the only song or music of any kind in the movie), Alexi remarks "Your voice doesn't sound the same. Your singing isn't pure" a certain snide of morality is passed as Hege elopes with the outsider Jurgen. Then there is the ghoulish and stern looking father Christiann whose arrival is anonymous. Grandieux delivers leaps over so that part remains unknown as to what relation the father had or from where he comes. His presence adds a very serious tone almost as pitch black as the interiors of the house. Certain elements also dictate that Grandieux may have been following Bresson's Notes on cinematography and merely the actors are models in cruel whether enacting without motives. 'Motive' that maybe the only thing missing here. The film ended beautifully with the sister Hege leaving with Jurgen by the lake. Leaving behind her elliptical brother, her blind mother and the agonizing whether behind. Though not a matter of judgement but yet the situation demands judgement even without flinching as to her abandonment of her family for a stranger. But the big question was when the film ended was that what made them choose such a penancing life in the first place ?
Review of Un lac
