“Occasionally frustrating and diffuse, but often entrancing and encouraging the viewer to meet it on its own terms and to find their own meaning within this tale of man passing through nature.”

Premiering in Locarno’s competition lineup, Le Lac (The Lake) is a bold effort from Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematographer and artistic collaborator during the final decade of his career. Taking clear inspiration from Godard while also allowing for his own artistic voice to shine through, Aragno has crafted a unique sensorial and visual experience that will not be to everyone’s taste, but is sure to entrance those who find themselves on its particular wavelength.

The film’s slender plot unfolds with minimal dialogue as Aragno follows an unnamed middle-aged couple (Clotilde Courau and Bernard Stamm) taking part in a five-day boat race on a large lake. We observe them working together both in calm weather and in overwhelming storms to keep their boat afloat, but the obsessive energy with which they throw themselves into this challenge remains alluringly opaque: is it the physical challenge of the race, a passion for sailing, the sense of satisfaction that comes with winning the race, or an unorthodox method to strengthen their relationship? Ultimately, Aragno suggests that through immersing themselves in this lake that is alternately wondrous and dangerous, the couple are seeking some sort of contact with a state of being that is beyond them, one that can only be glimpsed through the beauty of the clouds and the sounds of roaring waves and crying birds. There are also intriguing hints at a need to escape an inner sense of dissatisfaction and solitude, mostly thanks to Courau’s performance that emanates a sense of sadness and unease throughout. Courau and Stamm also offer impressively committed physical performances, as many of their scenes show them grappling with the nitty gritty of captaining a boat, and watching them one cannot help but be awed by the strength and prowess that goes into such an undertaking.

Aragno frequently cuts to images of clouds and forests, along with moments of people passing time on the shores of a lake – a father and his small child exploring the shore and a tree, a young couple sitting on a sea wall during a melancholy romantic encounter, families playing in the sand, a group of friends dancing around a bonfire – that underscore how this space can be a zone of human connection and discovery of the natural world. While these vignettes can feel disconnected from the boat race strand of the film, there is a calmness and sense of wonder to them that acts as a necessary counterpoint to the increasingly fraught maritime undertaking by the older couple. The film’s nighttime sequences also prove thought-provoking, as they highlight the mass of brightly lit but anonymous buildings that sit just beyond the lakeshore. Acting as specters of a capitalist system that is slowly but irreversibly encroaching on the natural world, they force the viewer to focus on what is being lost in a world of constant construction and evolution.

At times, the ultra-immersive sound work and camera perspectives are reminiscent of the work of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel (particularly Leviathan (2012), which shares an aquatic setting with this film). The audience’s immersion into the couple’s boating experience culminates in a sequence where the film is at its most Godardian: as the couple’s smaller boat encounters a yacht filled with tourists, the noise of the waves and the larger boat’s engine and horn become deafening as the viewer is overwhelmed by fragmented, freeze-frame images of churning water and flashbacks of the couple in happier times. On a visceral level, it’s an unsettling, almost otherworldly sequence that benefits from not being ascribed a clear meaning behind it. This is true for much of the film, occasionally frustrating and diffuse, but often entrancing and encouraging the viewer to meet it on its own terms and to find their own meaning within this tale of man passing through nature.