Before premiering Stranger by the Lake to universal acclaim at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, French director Alain Guiraudie had produced a genuinely unique body of work that now comprises three shorts, two seminal hour-long films and four features, all exuberant, elegant depictions of the lives of idiosyncratic individuals and their small communities in rural France. In detailing the workings of these communities, Guiraudie (b. 1964) pays special attention to the circulation of homoerotic desire among men – not so much the glossy urban hipsters typically associated with the gay community, but usually working – or solidly middle-class men in the provinces with a variety of bodies: old, young, skinny, overweight.

Guiraudie first garnered recognition with two medium-length works in 2001: Sunshine for the Scoundrels and That Old Dream that Moves. The writer-director himself has characterized these films as representing “two modes into which I want to plunge, between documentary and fiction, dream and reality, the light and the serious. My approach to Sunshine for the Scoundrels was the imaginary, the fable, heroic fantasy, injected with the social and the real. For That Old Dream That Moves, it was the opposite approach: starting with the social, then making it shift towards the imaginary.”

In the world of Guiraudie’s films, his characters may be subject to the laws of a distant and unsympathetic authority, but the greatest danger is alienation and boredom. In response, Guiraudie gives free rein to his imagination, particularly in his earlier work, in which the line between dream and reality is often thin. Those films are filled with constantly shifting tones, mixing the real and the fantastic, comedy and tragedy, betraying the director’s penchant for fanciful narrative. The two most recent films increasingly stick to realism, but with an undercurrent of mystery regarding the behavior of often unpredictable protagonists. Above all, Guiraudie’s films resemble fairy tales, in which innocent protagonists – whatever their age – must confront monsters and villains. There is nothing escapist about these fairy tales, however; they represent brilliantly original re-imaginings of our alienated age, presented in distorted form so we may see it differently. — David Pendleton