A second chance for Dumont

Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms is my least favorite movie of all time.

Most people wouldn’t know what movie they hated the most, but I do, because a little website called Flickchart has forced me to make that decision. Once a decision like that is made – that a movie will lose a hypothetical duel to every other movie on your chart – it tends to ossify. So now I know this is my least favorite film like I know that Raising Arizona is my favorite, and it would take a really, really exceptional example to unseat either one.

I won’t go into why I hate it so much. I did that already in this post.

I will say that thus far, this had been a death sentence for its French director. I had so written Dumont off that I had never watched another one of his movies, though I was peripherally aware of a few titles. I didn’t want to give the man one more minute than I’d already sacrificed on his hateful previous film.

But I also believe in second chances.

So nearly nine years after Twentynine Palms etched itself permanently in my cinematic record, I dipped my toe in the Dumont waters again.

The movie Ma Loute, whose English title is Slack Bay, didn’t strike me as anything like Twentynine Palms. As you can probably tell from the poster above, it looks more like something fanciful fellow countryman Jean-Pierre Jeunet would make than the tedious realism of what I described in the above-linked post as “the worst Vincent Gallo movie you can possibly imagine.”

Though obviously going in with my hackles up, I was intrigued. When I saw it on the shelf at the library recently, I snatched it up. Sunday afternoon, I watched it.

Although formally quite different from Twentynine Palms, Slack Bay shares that film’s sense of misanthropy. Bruno Dumont does not think all that much of his fellow human. That attitude is a bit more tolerable, though, when it comes in the form of satire, which is what Slack Bay really is. The costumes and production design might remind someone of Jeunet, but this is really more like Bunuel in its desire to poke fun at the bourgeoisie and engage in class warfare. As I am a big Bunuel fan, that’s a compliment.

The movie deals with a coastal region in France where city folks like to go on holiday. The tides render some of the lower-lying areas impassable, so a family of locals are among those who help the tourists navigate the area by boat, or in one of the film’s more fanciful constructs, even by physically carrying them through knee-deep water. That’s probably one of the film’s most obvious visual metaphors, but that doesn't mean it doesn’t work. The tourists are oblivious in general, but especially in regards to how they treat these working class locals. They’re also foppish fools, flopping about in their fancy outfits and overreacting about everything. Juliet Binoche is the personification of this, in a performance that might have annoyed me if I didn’t ultimately get on the same page as Dumont.

One of the reasons this film is far, far, far more tolerable than Twentynine Palms is that the misanthropy is leavened by a little optimism. There’s actually a sweet romantic undercurrent in this movie as relates to the teenage son of the local family and a teenage daughter of the main family of tourists we follow. There are complications along the way, I can say that without spoiling anything, but Dumont portrays this pair with an earnestness that feels hopeful.

Slack Bay has its disappointments, its moments of tedium. But the truest sign of its ultimate success is that I don’t want to spoil any of the plot, because I do recommend you see it. It’s a mild recommendation, and the movie falls well short of anything Bunuel has done, but it’s a recommendation nonetheless. In fact, in synopsizing the movie a couple paragraphs ago, I was inclined to let you in on a secret about this local family that the film actually reveals early enough on that it might justifiably be included in a synopsis. But Dumont has done enough right with this movie to earn back the courtesy I did not extend to him in that previous post, when I gave away the whole plot of Twentynine Palms just to indicate the depth of my disdain for it.

I’m in no hurry to rush out and see his other films, but no longer do I view him as the personification of cinematic evil, either.

That's a win for a guy who surely doesn't care about earning it.