“The lake” by Fabrice Aragno, in international competition in Locarno, is carried by the intense presence of the French actress Clothilde Courau alongside the Swiss browser Bernard Stamm. The couple faces a night sailing race on Lake Geneva.
Courageous choice, “Le Lac”, the first fictional feature of the Neuchâtel director, relies on a visual and sound narration, without dialogues. “It’s not a choice, it’s natural,” said Fabrice Aragno in Keystone-Ats. For him, cinema is above all an art of image and sound, like music or painting.
The director evokes eight years of creation, impacted by the pandemic and the disappearance of Jean-Luc Godard, for this project which goes beyond the simple nautical decor. Inspired by a sailing race without assistance of five days on Lake Geneva, the film explores the confrontation between a couple, nature and extreme fatigue: “We become animals. We don’t sleep. We feel more intensely”.
“Express what we can’t say”
More than a story, “the lake” is a sensory experience. “I wanted to express what we can’t say.” It is between the words it happens. Between two silences. You have to listen to what is hardly getting along. What circulates in a couple, in mourning, in love. “Silence becomes language here. The camera, a brush.
Because this intimate experience joins a pictorial reflection: “All the painters have remained on the shore, I want to enter the painting.” Friedrich, Munch, Turner but also Hergé inspire him.
Painting, he slips into literature. Duras, Flaubert, von Kleist irrigate the project. Fabrice Aragno abandoned the traditional scenario structure very early on to build his film from notes, images, striking sentences.
The initial scenario has finished “burned”. This singular approach earned the project to be selected at the Cinéfondation workshop in Cannes in 2021, just after the Pandemic.
The shooting evolves according to intuitions. A scene around a red balloon, as in the painting of Félix Vallotton (Le Ballon, 1899), appeared with a play of shadows in the garden of Bernard Stamm.
Bernard Stamm, from sailor to actor
Fabrice Aragno was looking for a Swiss actor, but badly imagined two actors on a sailboat. It was Bernard Stamm, Swiss navigator, whom he spots by chance and contacts for tests.
“I called him, thinking he was in the open sea. He was in a shopping center. We left for Brest with Clothilde Courau and my assistant. We turned tests in an evening. It was perfect”.
The projection is scheduled for August 14 in the FEVI room (Palexpo).
This article was published automatically. Source: ATS