"What’s unique about the visible is that it has an invisible lining which it renders visible as some sort of absence". This quote by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty which opens Fabrice Aragno’s first feature film, The Lake [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Fabrice Aragno |
scheda film], which burst into the competition section of the 78th  Locarno Film Festival, speaks volumes about the super atmospheric and suggestive mood exuded by this incredibly personal film, which masterfully blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary.

Full of raw poetry steeped in the elementary powers of nature, this cinematographic experience isn’t actually experimental in the slightest; it’s more akin to a window onto the audience’s sensations and imagination. In fact, Jean-Luc Godard’s former director of photography (notably responsible for The Image Book [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]) knows how to journey visually and sensorially into the starry sky, amidst rumbling thunder, uproarious tumult or dead calm and beyond the narrow circle of the usual range of perceptions, without ever losing track of the film’s guiding thread and the essence of life: feelings and love.

"You could have told me your wish, we could have shared it." A couple (Clotilde Courau and Bernard Stamm) plan on gliding across a lake on a sailboat for a few days and nights, on the occasion of a regatta, the start of which will mark the only feverishly sociable moment in an otherwise wholly solitary trip during which the two protagonists will barely say a word to one another. But between winch, sail and helm manoeuvres, short spells in the cabin to change their clothes in line with considerable variations in climactic conditions, underwater immersion (for one of them) to release the boat from the algae which is slowing them down, and ongoing contemplation of their environment (the water, the sky and the land), their looks, their posture and their gestures all express a great deal, offering up tenuous clues on the state of their emotions: has a dramatic event taken place or is it currently underway? Is their love in the final phase, still in the present but already a thing of the past?. Many such questions trace their way, like shooting stars, across this stretch of water in the middle of the mountains and in the wild, macroscopic (the wind, clouds and light) setting of nature, reducing the human world to microscopic levels.

Filming landscapes as if they were characters, and characters as if they were landscapes, Fabrice Aragno offers up a wonderful, enchanting dimension which is both highly physical and almost mystical, full of birdsong, the alternance of day and night (and their accompanying dawns and dusks), reflections on water, winds in sails and human activities glimpsed on the banks of the lake (like testimonials of a far-off world). It’s a journey lightly flirting with metempsychosis and interspersed with elliptical moments following the couple in the countryside, which this multi-talented filmmaker (who’s also co-credited for framing, sound and editing) depicts with sublime visual and aural skill, holding out a hand to viewers who will want to dive right on in and follow him into a magical underworld which draws on the best resources the 7th art can offer.

The Lake was produced by Casa Azul Films in co-production with RTS. For the record, the film was selected for Cinéfondation’s 2021 Workshop at the Cannes Film Festival.