Slack Bay

It took me three tries to finish this movie, because I couldn't watch more than 45 minutes at a time. The aggressive stupidity of the main characters would get to be too much to bear.

The film is set on the coast of France in the early 20th Century. A wealthy family of high-society idiots come to this bay every summer. They're a bunch of inbred morons. There has been a rash of disappearances of tourists in the area, being investigated by a pair of cops who seem like a take on Laurel & Hardy, except not funny at all. And there's a local fishing family who live and work in the area and keep interacting with the other two parties. The patriarch is called The Eternal, because he's saved so many endangered sailors off the coast of the years, and his tall, awkward, sullen oldest son is Ma Loute. They make some income ferrying people across the tidal pool, either by rowboat, or by carrying them when the water is low.

Their family are responsible for the disappearances, because they're also cannibals. The movie reveals this twenty minutes in, very casually and plainly, so I don't feel bad spoiling it. Also, this movie is terrible and you shouldn't waste time watching it.

There's a burgeoning romance between Ma Loute and Billie, the son of some combination of the wealthy idiots, who sometimes dresses as a woman. Ma Loute thinks Billie is a girl who sometimes dresses as a boy, which causes problems when he learns the truth. She drives him crazy, like the fine young cannibal he is. God, that's a terrible line, but this movie deserves it.

The problem is Bruno Dumont (who is director and wrote the screenplay and dialogue) has certain bits or tics for the characters he thinks are funny, so he keeps using them. But they fail to land. The fat inspector keeps laying down on the sand to inspect bodies, but can't get up without assistance. I think it's supposed to be funny, but there's nothing to it, and it just keeps happening. The behavior of the wealthy family is bizarre, but so exaggerated that it's just irritating. I don't really want to root for the cannibals, but I wouldn't have been sorry if they killed and murdered the family.

The romance between Billie and Ma Loute was not badly done. There's an awkwardness to it that felt genuine and touching. They don't necessarily understand each other, and Billie's family doesn't help with their patronizing attitude towards him (and the fact they're afraid to even shake hands with Ma Loute's parents), but they seemed comfortable with each other. Until things went south, naturally.

I've been considering whether Dumont was doing a satire of an American slasher film. We have movies where stupid horny teens go to the dark, scary woods to smoke pot and have sex, only to be murdered by feral, cannibals hillbillies. Dumont sets it on a bright, sunny summer beach, the family is mostly old people who are detached from any sense of reality outside the strange world they occupy, and the cannibals are a hardworking, tightly-knit working class family (we first see the entire family harvesting mussels off the rocks during low tide). Instead of some hick cops, you get a couple of inspectors in nice black suits, who are dedicated but nonetheless useless.

I don't think that's the case; it's just the most charitable interpretation I can muster.