The Idea of a Lake

La Idea De Un Lago a 2016 film directed by Milagros Mumenthaler.

Long shots with (supposedly) diagetic sound design are magnetic. I'm not sure why. They last for ages. Really a long time on a number of shots. It's mesmerising. Sometimes there's a slow zoom in. Sometimes there's an obvious reason for the shot being held for so long. Someone walks out of the house for example. In a photograph from the 1970's, the father slowly fades away until nothing remains of him as the stillness of the sea behind him starts to glisten, and waves form and crash signalling a time shift to the past.

I like the way that memories are shown to be flexible, misinterpreted, personal and different. In one scene, two children are not caught in a night-time game of hide and seek in the forest. The creaks, the darkness, the unknown, the strange merging of actual time and dream-like time are all evoked beautifully and when small round lights, appear, moving randomly on the horizon, my thoughts went from:

The other children are back, maybe not so much time has passed....to:

There's loads of them, it's a search party, they've alerted the adults...to:

These aren't torches, they're fireflies.

Wonderful. I was definitely in the mind of the child who was hiding.

The main character, Ines, addresses the audience directly in a head and shoulder shot a number of times throughout the film. She's giving narrative information. It's not clear who she's talking to, her eye-line is slightly off camera.

Complex relationships, memories and multi layered communication are shown in a brilliantly clever scene where Ines is zooming into a photo of her as a toddler, with her dad, the last photo of them ever together, and she is simultaenously having a text conversation with her mum.

The conversation is on screen, the words pop up in front of the photo. "I keep thinking of your separation" over Ines as a toddler reinforces the mother/daughter relationship, and the separations between Ines and her father, and herself and Ines' father.

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With relation to Bonjour Tristesse, I can take reference from this film for the following elements:

§ First person narrator, narrating a memory directly to the audience.

§ Female scriptwriter and director, with female protagonist.

§ Memories shown to be changeable and maleable, demonstrating unreliable narrator.

§ The complexities of relationships.

§ The landscape, particularly the sea and the heat.

§ The transitions into memories and the flipping around between different pasts.

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