Ela Grisaru and Dana Levy | Lake / 2014

strange beauty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ela Grisaru and Dana Levy (screenwriters and directors) Lake / 2014 [8 minutes] [animated film]

 

In the short Israeli animated film Lake a hiker gets lost in the woods, becoming tired and frustrated. He consults his map and moves further into the brush without knowing where he’s going. But suddenly he spots water ahead, shedding his backpack and clothes as he dives in for a swim.

      Eventually, he spots a beautiful young boy with flowers in his hair, picking berries from a nearby bush while his body remains covered in the water of the lake.

      Intrigued, he moves closer to the boy and watches him as he continues to pull down berries and put them into his small round, red mouth. He too attempts to pick a berry, but brings down only leaves and breaks a branch off with no berries attached. For a moment, he seems irritated by the result. But soon the boy reaches puts his hand to his face and touches it, laughing.

     The hiker also laughs, as the two begin a water tossing game, the way children and lovers play. The child moves away with the hiker following, enchanted with the boy’s beauty. Eventually, the hiker catches up with the sprite, finding him so very lovely that he too reaches out to touch the boy’s face, stroking it for a moment, as the boy comes closer to him and kisses him, the hiker, unable to resist, kissing him back.

      But suddenly the hiker realizes what he’s doing, and hurries off, ashamed for having made love to a child. He wades out of the water tripping while looking back to see the boy following, as it comes of the water revealing himself to be a full centaur, his lower body resembling that of a horse.

      Terrified of the revelation, the man, still naked, runs off into the woods, not knowing what to make of the situation. Has he just kissed a mythical beast, who might, in turn, attack him? The strangeness of the entire situation horrifies him as he races further and further into the undergrowth.

     Finally, losing his breath with mosquitoes attacking him, the hiker stops, unable to go on any further. He realizes finally that he has no choice but to return. He pulls off a large stick from a nearly tree, planning clearly to use it as a club if necessary.

    Seeing the beast near his backpack he rushes in like a brute the club waving in his hand as the centaur hurries off. But when he finally looks down at the ground, he notices a leaf filled with the red berries, left there as gesture of love by the beast.

      As he wades back into the water to wash off, he regrets and appears ashamed of his violent action. And from the corner of his eye, he observes the centaur watching him. As he sits down at the water’s edge the “creature” dares to come nearer and eventually sits down beside him as the credits begin to roll.

     Obviously, he has made inner peace with the beautiful and very different creature and himself, recognizing the beauty of the beast, and his own immediate attraction to it.

     If this perhaps does not perfectly parallel a fable of a heterosexual man finding himself attracted to a “strange” or “different” kind of being (read “gay), rejecting it, and then learning to accept it for its true beauty, it comes close enough to serve as a story about reconciliation with the previously unthinkable and unknowable, perhaps even an admission of one’s own attraction to that very strange being, perhaps someone whose gender is simply undefinable.

 

Los Angeles, October 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).