Slack Bay (2017)

Slack Bay (2017)

IMDB Rating : 6.2/10 (as on 22.04.2017)

Unrated | 2h 2min | Comedy

Summer 1910. Several tourists have vanished while relaxing on the beautiful beaches of the Channel Coast. Infamous inspectors Machin and Malfoy soon gather that the epicenter of these mysterious disappearances must be Slack Bay, a unique site where the Slack river and the sea join only at high tide. There lives a small community of fishermen and other oyster farmers. Among them evolves a curious family, the Bréfort, renowned ferrymen of the Slack Bay, lead by the father nick-named "The Eternal", who rules as best as he can on his prankster bunch of sons, especially the impetuous Ma Loute, aged 18. Towering high above the bay stands the Van Peteghems' mansion. Every summer, this bourgeois family - all degenerate and decadent from inbreeding - stagnates in the villa, not without mingling during their leisure hours of walking, sailing or bathing, with the ordinary local people, Ma Loute and the other Bréforts. Over the course of five days, as starts a peculiar love story between Ma Loute and the young and mischievous Billie Van Peteghem, confusion and mystification will descend on both families, shaking their convictions, foundations and way of life.

Director: Bruno Dumont

Writers: Bruno Dumont (dialogue), Bruno Dumont (screenplay)

Stars: Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

IMDB link here

If the ‘Slack Bay’ Characters Ask You to Lunch, Don’t Go

GLENN KENNY

A funny thing happened to the French director Bruno Dumont a few years back: He discovered whimsy, or at least something like it. Mr. Dumont made his feature debut in 1997, with the striking “The Life of Jesus,” which built on the unflinching confrontation of emotional extremes pioneered by the filmmaker Maurice Pialat. His subsequent works — including the harrowing “Twentynine Palms,” the enigmatic war film “Flanders” and the gloss on Bressonian themes “Hadewijch” — are serious, searing pictures, replete with content and imagery that even the most adventurous viewer could find hard to stomach.

But his 2014 television mini-series, “Li’l Quinquin,” about an impish kid caught up in a grisly murder mystery, added an antic playfulness to the Dumont vocabulary. And his new feature, “Slack Bay,” widens that scope.

“Slack Bay” is set in a tiny seaside community in northern France, sometime in the early 1900s. Here live two families. The “haves” are the wealthy Van Peteghems, whose patriarch, André (Fabrice Luchini), a simpering hunchback, presides (after a fashion) over an ominous stone manse on a hill overlooking the bay. The “have-nots” are the Bruforts, whose own patriarch is nicknamed the Eternal. They run a ferry service in which the Eternal and his oldest son, called Ma Loute (also the film’s French title), often hand-carry passengers over a marsh. Sometimes they use a boat. And on these trips they sometimes bludgeon their passengers to death, take the bodies to their humble home and eat them.

As this family enacts a Gallic variation of the Monty Python “Woody and Tinny Words” sketch, the human body parts in the Brufort hut grow more numerous. This is a spirited and often gorgeous film (Guillaume Deffontaines, the cinematographer, makes the eyes of even the most ostensibly unattractive characters supernaturally beautiful), but it’s not an easy one. As it turns out, modes of farce and fantasy enable Mr. Dumont to pull the rug out from under the viewer in a number of new and upsetting ways. Be prepared.

Read full review at New york Times

Movie rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆  

Juliette Binoche goes mesmerically over the top in bizarre seaside comedy

Peter Bradshaw

Is there a more extraordinary auteur career than that of Bruno Dumont? Having started as one of Europe’s foremost purveyors of extreme cinema and extreme seriousness, he made a startling move to wacky broad comedy, and is handling it as if to the manner born. Now he gives us Ma Loute, or Slack Bay, a macabre pastoral entertainment by the seaside from the belle époque: it’s an old-fashioned provincial comedy with something of Clochemerle, a world in which everyone seems to have drunk their bodyweight in absinthe. There’s also the surreal meta-strangeness of Ken Russell’s version of The Boyfriend.

The film features a gallery of nightmare faces and outrageous performances from French cinema A-listers: hilarious or unforgivable, according to taste. They include Fabrice Luchini, Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi and even Juliette Binoche who all go over the top; actually, Bruni-Tedeschi is relatively restrained compared to the operatic whooping and mugging from Binoche. It is as mesmeric and bizarre as the slo-mo “beach-yacht” crash that brings one of the characters close to death.

The nearest comparison I can think of for Dumont’s tonal shift is David Gordon Green, who started his career as an obvious inheritor of Malick; then bafflingly switched tracks to fratboy laughs, and periodically switched back. But those seem like arbitrary leaps. Dumont’s comedy really has grown organically from his earlier, serious work. (Woody Allen is another point of comparison, but moving in the other tonal direction.) Seventeen years ago in Cannes, Dumont caused shock-waves with his brutally realist, yet enigmatic drama L’Humanité, about a killer at large in a northern French town, and a cop who seems so placid, so clueless as to be bordering on having learning disabilities. L’Humanité contained ideas that had been present in his debut, The Life of Jesus and in subsequent movies which had mysterious epiphanies and anti-realist inconsistencies. Then came Dumont’s comedy, made originally for French television, P’tit Quinquin which restated his themes from L’Humanité in terms of comedy. He has now returned to these ideas again in Slack Bay. Maybe murders in northern France and bafflingly incompetent cops are to Dumont what water lilies were to Monet.

Ma Loute is a fascinatingly made film, theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little over-extended. Dumont’s earlier and similar comedy P’tit Quinquin paradoxically worked better at the extended length of a mini-series, in which all the surreal episodes and byways and culs-de-sac could be thoroughly explored. And the comedy itself might be a little de trop for some, just as the violence and mystery of L’Humanité was too much for some back in 1999. Ma Loute is still very strange and very funny.

Read full review at The Guardian

Movie rating 🌟🌟🌟☆  ☆  

Slack Bay's comedy cannibals prove hard to swallow - review

Tim Robey

The career of French troublemaker Bruno Dumont requires some explanation. Possibly none is sufficient. His films, of which there have been eight to date, usually involve sex, murder and livestock in northern France – true of his early, unfunny ones, like the notoriously bleak L'Humanité, which won a very controversial Cannes Grand Prix back in 1999.

But even when Dumont is “doing” funny, which he has suddenly decided he is, you need to be prepared for a bunch of people to be killed, chopped up into tiny pieces, and fed to children.

Binoche doesn’t arrive for several reels, but gets the kind of twirling introduction in an elaborate feathered hat that just screams “feed me to the cannibals”. The sister of a local toff called André Van Peteghem (Fabrice Luchini), she swans in for her annual visit (it’s 1910) without being forewarned about a spate of disappearing tourists, which has caused a corpulent inspector from Calais, Machin (Didier Desprès) to roll in and investigate.

Comedy, eh? It’s either tragedy plus time, or absolutely anything – L'Humanité, try it – with the Benny Hill theme music played over the top. The early stretches of Slack Bay promise something wacky and riotous, if you’re in the right mood. Luchini, ever-reliable, plays his character as a hunchbacked nincompoop, clearly the product of centuries of inbreeding – which becomes a plot point.

Dumont wants to sustain ambiguity about Billie’s gender, with an actress evidently willing to help the cause, and it’s unclear to us, too, whether the strapping, lumpen-faced beachcomber’s son Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville, debuting) knows what bits she’s got.

They strike up a romance complicated further by Ma Loute’s carnivorous tendencies: yep, it’s his family who have been hoovering up holidaymakers, including a Brit or two, by rowing them out to sea and then knocking them unconscious when no one’s looking.

Fans of "Funny Dumont" only really have his prior work P’tit Quinquin (2014), a four-hour comic murder mystery broadcast as a miniseries on French TV, to go by. He’s copying the formula here, right down to the younger deputy assisting Machin, and he’s copying it less well, despite having major stars on board who are this willing to make fools of themselves. Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.

When first Isabelle, then Machin spontaneously levitate, it’s a jolly enough development, but also an arbitrary tonal lurch that smacks of slight desperation.

There’s a beautifully timed slapstick payoff to the scene when Luchini takes his sand yacht out for a spin. But Dumont is trying too hard to get these big laughs, and he’s trying for too many. Comedy’s his new toy – he needs to be careful not to break it.

Read full review at Telegraph

Slack Bay (Ma Loute) is a one-of-a-kind outing from perennially outre French auteur Bruno Dumont, a stylized slapstick art film that commingles in-bred upper-class twits and murderous roughneck fishermen on the northern French coast, circa 1910; it’s like an unholy alliance between Jacques Tati and Euro-period Joseph Losey, one that will justifiably cause many viewers to wonder — what have we just seen?

More weirdly fascinating than genuinely good, this beautifully made, bracingly eccentric and often arch film will generate a measure of strong support but will bewilder more than entrance most traditional art-house regulars.

The basic nuts and bolts of Dumont’s strange little tale pertain to a police investigation of the disappearances of several people in a small windswept community on the English Channel. Dumont immediately makes clear that the local hillbilly-like Brufort clan is responsible — they are, in fact, cannibals. But the authorities, represented by a Laurel and Hardy-like team of police inspectors named Machin and Malfoy (Didier Despres and Cyril Rigaux), are clownlike bumblers in black suits and bowler hats without a clue, so the murders continue unabated and unattributed.

By contrast, the mysterious Billie benefits from saying very little. Ma Loute, a ruffian who looks like a tidewater rat with dreadful teeth, is seemingly softened and transformed by this exquisite, mysterious creature, and a conventional film would have used this star-crossed romance to demolish the class divide.

Ever the contrarian, however, Dumont has other things in mind, and the conclusion, without giving anything away, weirdly combines ever-more-extreme physical humor with soaring lyrical music, the results of which prove simultaneously arresting and puzzling, which is entirely in line with the nutty nature of the film itself.

Providing continuous and bracing pleasure is the production’s look, with Guillaume Deffontaines’ sharp, crystalline cinematography making vivid use of the windswept expanses of empty beaches, rocky cliffs, tide pools and rough channel waters. Witty costuming also is used to tart effect.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter