Synopsis
Slack Bay (Ma Loute, 2016) is Bruno Dumont's grotesque period farce, available to watch online on iFILM. It's the summer of 1910 on the windswept dunes of northern France, and tourists keep vanishing from a pretty little bay. Two comically inept inspectors, the enormous Machin and his sidekick Malfoy, waddle in to investigate.
Two families sit at the center of the mess. The Brefort clan are dirt-poor mussel-gatherers who quietly supplement their diet with the missing travelers. The van Petegems are inbred, mannered bourgeois summering in a hilltop villa, every one of them faintly deranged. Then young Ma Loute Brefort falls for Billie van Petegem, and nothing about that romance is straightforward either. Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi play the whole circus dead straight.
Dumont folds slapstick, body horror and deadpan absurdity into something genuinely strange. This is arthouse provocation that will either win you over or send you running. Stream Slack Bay (2016) online on iFILM.
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