Film Review: Ma Loute

Director: Bruno Dumont

Producers: Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Bréhat, Muriel Merlin

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Luc Vincent, Didier Desprès, Laura Dupré, Brandon Lavieville, Angélique Vergara, Cyril Rigaux, Raph

Running time: 2h 2min

            Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay (Ma Loute) is beautiful and strange like nothing I’ve ever seen. The narrative follows two families in an inlet off the coast of France at opposite ends of the social spectrum: the Bruforts, fishermen in the bay, and the Van Peteghems, bourgeoisie tourists. When people start to go missing in Slack Bay, bumbling local police chief Machin and his diminutive partner Malfoy come in to investigate but without much success. André and Isabelle Van Peteghem, the owners of Typhonium, the massive Egyptian style villa overlooking the bay, are eccentric, to say the leas, and are endlessly charmed by the quaint culture of the mussel gatherers. The Van Peteghems, like many of the characters, are prone to fits of passion and excitement that often find them falling down to the ground or even off a cliff. The cast seemed to really take to the theatrics of their ridiculous characters and Dumont, perhaps intentionally, did very little to rein that in. In fact, it was the subtler characters who really stole the show, like the Van Peteghem’s niece, Billie, daughter of Aude Van Peteghem, André’s sister.

While visiting the bay one day, Billie strikes an interest in Ma Loute Brufort, the son of a mussel farmer in the bay who makes his living taking tourists across the bay. Billie is known to frequently dress as a boy and is referred to by her mother with male pronouns. Billie herself claims that she is a girl, “in disguise”. The treatment of Billie’s gender is a minor detail in the film that doesn’t seem to bother Ma Loute and at most seems to slightly confuse the investigators. Billie is equally unfazed by Ma Loute’s low-brow demeanor and even his habit of cannibalism. In a more traditional film, the budding romance between Ma Loute and Billie might serve to close the class divide evident between the two families, but Dumont has different ideas about wealth disparity. Ma Loute ends up in the arms of the incompetent maid of Typhonium, a young woman named Nadège who often left the Van Peteghem’s going hungry because she could never manage to serve from the left.

In a film this absurd, even something like cannibalism seems quirky than horrifying. The Brufort children circle around a bucket, chewing on shiny ruby red chunks of flesh that are somewhat ambiguous until their mother comes outside, holding a human foot and asking if anyone wanted any toes. Only the crystalline cinematography of Guillaume Deffontaines and the idyllic setting of the French coast could make such a scene so comfortable and even pleasurable. The sense of comfort with the cannibalism may also be attributed to how inhuman all of the characters seems to be, Aude and Isabelle Van Peteghem swing around like raging puppets and the bloated chief Machin waddles and crashes like an unbalanced top. One of the most distinct features of this film is the elastic sound of movement. The vacationers especially sound as though they were made out of plastic, making a statement about the vapid and inauthentic nature of the elite. The cannibalism itself is a manifestation of the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. In the world of early twentieth century Europe, in which the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer, the Bruforts found a way to reverse this class dominance by capturing and eating unassuming tourists who view them as nothing more than scenery. The investigators never catch on to the Bruforts scheme and are perfectly happy to come home and be celebrated after finding a few of the missing beachgoers in a net on the beach.

The rich palette of blues is complemented by soft whites and yellows rounds out the widescreen shots, making the eye desperate to catch every detail. The film closes with its most stunning scene yet, a painterly and entirely empty beachscape with the exception of the neat line of the cast chasing down the inspector who had finally blown up so large that he began to float away.

The humor of the film is almost exclusively physical and deceptively dry. At times the film seems to reference and take pleasure in its own absurdity. In a particularly drawn out and non sequitur trumpet solo performed by the troops sent out to look for some of the missing beachgoers, the background soldiers squirm and shift on their feet like actors between shots. Some of the physical gags do grow weaker through repetition. After all, one can only laugh at a fat guy falling down a sand dune so many times. The best characters to laugh at were the ones that seemed to take themselves the most seriously, if nothing else but for the incongruity of their polished appearance and ridiculous actions.

Slack Bay was captivating in its scene dressing and had me laughing throughout the entire film without telling a single joke. Dumont nailed the inconsistencies of elite life, sweeping from grotesque extremes of Rococo splendor to muddy squalor.