Falcon Lake
Charlotte Le Bon’s romantic coming-of-age tale…with a ghost.
Few things feel so perfectly of the season in which they’re depicted as they are in Charlotte Le Bon’s first feature, Falcon Lake. The completely manufactured yet wholly believable fall gusts of the midwest season in Carpenter’s Halloween (dead leaves were imported to Southern California neighborhoods during the peak of summer), the cycles of each dreadful season in the deeply haunting Lady in White, and the palpable sticky-hot summer heatwave in Robert Mulligan’s otherwise chilling film The Other. All serve as reference points to Le Bon’s illustrative portrait of one particular summer spent with Bastien and his family at a lake house with family friends.
Bastien feels a familiar loneliness most kids do at the start of their teens: awkwardly stretched across the middle of their journey towards adulthood but at the head of hormonal imprisonment within the vice grip of puberty. His younger brother is still very much a child and Bastien gives him the support he needs, but is already yearning to rebel. All he needs is a push. And in meeting Chloé, an older girl visiting with her family, he starts to drift confidently towards her. She shares with Bastien that a girl drowned in the lake where they’re staying, just on the other side of the bank near the trees in the dark swathe of ominous shadow just over Bastien’s shoulder. Chloé is mildly obsessed with the images of death and the supernatural and begins to influence Bastien with them, who absorbs her fascinations quickly.
As they draw closer together the focus turns quickly towards the social circles of the kids of each family vacationing at the lake. Chloé sits at the point of intersection between Bastien’s world and the others, yet also at none of them. Still, without her guidance Bastien becomes hopelessly lost and adrift. There’s something of a language barrier too. Bastien speaks only French and nearly all of the others exclusively speak English. Chloé’s ability to navigate both languages and worlds makes her essential to navigating the summer unscathed, like a life vest had that poor girl worn one before swimming out too far into the lake.
The imagery in Falcon Lake is nothing short of beautiful. Photographed on 16mm film the summer landscape and flora simply glow with warmth even after the sun has gone down, its radiance stored within the shapes of leaves and branches for even the darkest hours. The colors of nature here especially sing within vibrant oranges, greens, a golden yellow finish casting the final coat on the paintings of each gloriously framed shot. And even the fingers of dead trees lend an eerie beauty to the film. One shot of a dead doe that Bastien stares at is especially striking. The cinematography is just as compelling if not more in places, offering a variety of textures in its subjects. An artistic mixture of focal odds and ends complement rather than distract, displaying an aesthetic experience that entices even in its outwardly discordant presentation. Put simply, the film is gorgeous to behold even in its most plain shots. Which makes the sensations of fear, joy, and rage feel even more sensitive against this picturesque yet uncaring backdrop of natural beauty.
Bastien has a fear of the water but never truly admits to it; when he was younger he almost drowned and since then has never been back in the water for any depth or duration of time. He instead hangs on the upper end of the beach or the dock on a solid foundation, watching others glide through the water with ease and happiness. But he doesn’t take his fear to be debilitating when it comes to meeting the others’ social expectations. He takes alcohol when it’s offered (and going a little too far in some places), sneaks out at night until the wee hours of the morning, and makes appearances at a house party that feels strangely out of place for a lakeside retreat and more of a college kegger. But the catalyst for his desire to do any of these things is Chloé, who seems to wipe away any and all pretenses of nervousness or fear.
And so it is that Falcon Lake bobs into the uncharted territories of burgeoning sexuality for Bastien in particular. Its contemplative nature of exploration over expectation is refreshing and takes pleasure in relishing the good moments while still examining the bad ones. In Bastien’s view, someone so innocent still, we reside more in the mature view of things than he would ever realize in hindsight. The horror of death hangs over nearly every moment of adolescent hedonism yet never fully rears its head. And yes, the fact that this is also a ghost story doesn’t mean that a ghost promised needs to be exploited for the camera’s sake. Le Bon plays with those expectations in a wonderful artful way with Chloé’s Harold and Maude-like photoshoots, even finding a perfect model in Bastien. And each time he inevitably steps in the water and slowly wades out to meet the surface, your chest might tighten and you just might forget to breathe.
Falcon Lake opens in select theaters nationwide this Friday, June 2nd from Yellow Veil Pictures. See the full list of theatrical offerings here.
The film will also be available digitally June 13th.
[this article was originally published on june 1, 2023 on celluloid consomme.]
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