Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition. Every so often a Swiss film competes, but usually they are set aside in their own national competition. Unlike, say, the French films in the Cannes competition, Swiss films are given pride of place in Locarno based on quality rather than patriotic pride or an imperative to support the local film industry. This is all relevant to mention because the Swiss film in competition this year, Fabrice Aragno’s Le Lac, is an exceptional film in every regard. Essentially a landscape film with just the slightest suggestion of narrative, Le Lac is captivating from start to finish, for almost entirely formal reasons. While watching Le Lac, even if you didn’t know that Aragno was the cinematographer for Godard’s last films, you would absolutely recognize the director’s exquisite use of light, color, and framing. However, unlike the films he made with Godard — Film Socialism and Goodbye to Language chief among them — Le Lac really does, for the most part, say “goodbye” to language. Aside from a few lines of dialogue and a poem with stanzas that appear in the opening, middle, and closing moments, this is a silent film.
In fact, there are extended passages of Le Lac that are completely silent. Sound drops out entirely, all the better to focus our attention on the lines, shapes, and plane Aragno has assembled. As the title makes clear, this is a film primarily about a lake — Lake Geneva to be exact. And while Aragno provides us with the skeletal narrative of a couple (Clotilde Courau and Bernard Stamm) taking part in a sailboat race on the lake, the sailing scenes serve only as a kind of backbeat against which he explores painterly concerns. Much of the film is devoted to different colors of sky, various distinct cloud formations, and the many ways that city lights can impress themselves upon the water. While the race implies narrativity at its most primal — getting from point A to point B before other people doing the same — human presence in the film is less individual and more primordial. The film is above all a tone poem about Lake Geneva and the areas surrounding it, resulting in a film somewhere between the European sensibilities of Godard, Straub, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the purer, more non-narrative environments of Robert Beavers and Peter Hutton.
Aragno’s lack of concern for storytelling is evident in his highly unconventional montage. For instance, at several points in the film, he cuts to dry land, where we see Courau and Stamm lying in the grass in an embrace. Where the aquatic sequences reference the seascapes of Turner, and the night shots of the lakeshore conjure Monet, these flashbacks (or possibly flash-forwards) resemble the art of Andrew Wyeth and the enveloping natural world of Terrence Malick. Apart from the fact that these two people love each other, and are trained to sail, we learn next to nothing about them. Instead, they are extensions of the landscape, their monohull craft an object that cuts shapes across the sky. Using oblique angles and complex framing, Aragno depersonalizes both his actors and the boat, preferring to focus on the stark image of a mast jutting up into the sky, sometimes with Courau hanging from it, other times just the taut ropes of the mast.
Not surprisingly for such a close collaborator of Godard, Aragno uses sound design to enrobe the spectator in the natural elements. While there are occasional appearances of a percussive music track, most of the time we simply hear the blunt force of wind off the lake hitting the microphone, the distortion forming a solid wall of noise. Then, just as we have accustomed ourselves to this relentless, abstract audio, Le Lac cuts the sound altogether, puncturing the non-boat shots with a Brakhage-like silence. Then, gradually, audio returns, but in such a muted manner that you may not recognize its presence at first.
There are specific aspects of Le Lac that rhyme with the images Aragno created for Godard. In particular, the director coaxes dazzling colors from his digital cinematography, icy blues and electric oranges and inky blacks and grays. But one of Le Lac’s most Godardian gestures is Aragno’s frequent close-ups of hands. Stamm and Courau are often shown tightening the sails or removing seaweed from the bottom of the hull, a nod to Godard’s cinematic fascination with manual labor. But we also see one actor’s hand in isolation, with the other actor’s hand reaching out and clasping it. Both work and love entail literal handiwork in Le Lac, subtly suggesting that in a very real sense, they are one and the same.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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