‘Hawk Lake’
Address: Charlotte LeBon
Artists: Joseph Engel and Sara Montpetit
Premiere: September 22, 2023
★★★★
There is an expression that has been frequently used in criticism in recent years. It is this: fantasy as a setting. However, it generally refers to films that use the resources of the genre to enrich or make the story unique, without fully delving into fantasy cinema. In most cases, this use of fantasy is specific (e.g., the inclusion of a dream-like or hallucinatory scene) or aesthetic. In the latter case, writers often prefer a setting that is several degrees removed from reality. But this atmosphere rarely really engages with the story and characters. In short, the fantasy setting tends to be a little too big for most of these movies. ‘This is not the case in Şahin Lake, The surprising feature debut of Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon.
The director, who is also one of the writers of the script, constructs an origin story around a lake: A teenager falls in love with a girl slightly older than him.. There is a mystery around the lake, and this mystery permeates the images (taken at 16 millimeters). It covers them, conditions them, qualifies them. And in doing so, this couple’s relationship with youthful energy, desire, fear, and death takes on a completely ghostly state that connects us to that adolescence, to the melancholy of a time we can never fully understand.