Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay is about as odd and eccentric a movie as I can remember. You might search for meaning, or at least a coherent story, but you won’t find much of either. Instead, the film digs for deep-seated absurdity – and finds it.
The picture takes place on the north coast of France, near Calais on the English Channel in about 1910. A formidable house overlooks an expanse of land and coastline. The owner says the architecture is Egyptian, but it looks awfully 19th century European, so I suspect that the owners are wrong, as they are about everything else. The other dwelling in the film contains a family who make their living gathering mussels and cooking something mysterious in a big pot in front of their rundown coastal shack. You can’t discern where the two homes are with respect to each other.
The people who inhabit these places tend to walk strangely – and rarely in a straight line. They fall down. Their heads look stuck on their necks uncomfortably. Their unmodulated voices often rise pointlessly at the end of sentences, and they repeat themselves, sometimes idiotically. They sound like lunatics, which they are. The poor mussel-gatherers rarely talk at all. The mussel gatherers also provide a ferry service across a small inlet for the tourists. A rowboat lies ready, but it’s not always used. Much of the time, the tourists are carried one by one in the arms of the ferriers.
And there’s a complication. Other tourists have been disappearing from the area, and two local detectives are investigating. One is monstrously large, as if inflated. The other is small and redheaded, and he looks about 15 years old. Neither of these men strikes you as a canny sleuth. Why tourists would come to this place is also a good question. It’s not a handsome landscape; it’s marked by misshapen dunes and fetid waters. The locals are unwelcoming to a disturbing degree.
The original French title of Slack Bay is Ma Loute, which translates roughly as how a man might describe a woman as “my gal.” It’s the name of the leading young man in the film, played by a first-time actor Brandon Lavieville, who’s made up to look like a full-out geek.
Slack Bay is made for a certain kind of sensibility and taste for absurdity, which is not mine. There’s little direction to the script, so after a while – a period of time that’s shorter than the film – the lurching and shrieking, the chasing and the thick comic accents in French, wear out their welcome.
For me, the height of the picture is actress Juliette Binoche, who enters the film shrieking and leaves it babbling, her head swathed in bandages. She’s the mother of one of the deranged tourists, and the best actor in the cast. She thoroughly embodies the mad absurdity of the film, and if you’ve followed Binoche’s work in other movies, you might marvel that she also has this stuff in her.
Her co-star, playing her husband with a matching screech in his voice and a slack jaw, is Fabrice Lucchini, also capable of serious ineffability.
Director Bruno Dumont, is the maker of The Life of Jesus and Humanité. He has a serious following in France and elsewhere. His experience is obvious all through Slack Bay. Dumont is sure of his moves; it’s a disciplined film. But it seems to me that like any other movie, a film based in absurdity has to end at some point, and with this material it’s hard to make an ending feel like an ending. Part of the last bit is funny; part is full-out grisly, which has to do with the tourists who have disappeared and that big pot. Still, there’s no place for things to go. That may be the point, but if you don’t buy into the looniness of Slack Bay, there’s not much satisfaction.
