General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Slack Bay

Slack Bay (French title Ma Loute) is a 2016 French-German comedy film directed by Bruno Dumont, set in the summer of 1910 on the Bay of the Slack (Baie de la Slack) on the northern French coast, where tourists begin to vanish from the beaches and two bumbling inspectors are sent to investigate¹^•². It premiered in Competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Film Award at the Seville European Film Festival¹^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Original / international title	Ma Loute / Slack Bay²
Director and year	Bruno Dumont, 2016; 122 minutes; France, Germany¹
Festival history	In Competition at Cannes 2016; Best Film Award at the Seville European Film Festival¹^•³
Main cast	Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Luc Vincent, Brandon Lavieville, Raph, Didier Després, Cyril Rigaux⁴
Setting	Summer 1910, the Bay of the Slack, northern France, where the Slack river joins the sea only at high tide²
Budget	$7.5 million (€6.9 million), a French-German co-production⁵
Release	France 13 May 2016; Belgium 8 June 2016²
Reception	64% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (80 reviews); 4.1/5 average from 25 French press reviews on AlloCiné against 2.4/5 from spectators⁶^•⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The story takes place over five days in the summer of 1910 on the Channel Coast, at a bay where the Slack river and the sea meet only at high tide². Several tourists have vanished while relaxing on the beaches, and the infamous inspectors Machin and Malfoy are called in; their investigation leads them to a small community of fishermen and oyster farmers².

Two families stand at opposite ends of the social spectrum. The Bréfort (also spelled Brufort) family are renowned ferrymen led by a patriarch nicknamed "The Eternal"; among his sons is the impetuous 18-year-old Ma Loute, who carries customers across the shallow bay in his arms for 20 centimes each²^•⁹. High above the bay, in a mansion called Typhonium, the wealthy bourgeois Van Peteghem family spends every summer: André Van Peteghem (Fabrice Luchini), his wife Isabelle (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), and his imperious sister Aude (Juliette Binoche)⁹^•¹⁰.

A love story develops between Ma Loute and the young, mischievous Billie Van Peteghem (Raph), a cross-dressing teenager whose sex confuses the other characters, and confusion and mystification descend on both families²^•¹¹. The film mixes its murder mystery with cannibalism, a gender-fluid romance, and themes of incest¹¹^•¹². After the characters make a pilgrimage on the beach to the shrine of Our Lady of the Waves, one rises into the air in a moment of ecstatic rapture, the first of several such levitations.⁹

Production

Dumont wrote the screenplay and dialogue, directed, and co-edited the film with Basile Belkhiri; Guillaume Deffontaines was the cinematographer, Riton Dupire-Clément the art director, and Alexandra Charles the costume designer²^•⁴. The producers were Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Bréhat, and Muriel Merlin, with co-producers Rémi Burah, Thanassis Karathanos, and Olivier Père; production companies included 3B Productions, ARTE France Cinéma, Scope Pictures, and Twenty Twenty Vision².

The film was budgeted at $7.5 million (€6.9 million), a French-German co-production involving 3B Productions, the broadcaster Arte, the Nord-Pas de Calais fund Pictanovo, and Berlin-based TwentyTwenty Vision, with participation from France's National Cinema Centre (CNC), Canal+, Cine+, Arte WDR, and the Nord-Pas de Calais Region⁵. Memento Films International handled international sales, launching them at the Cannes Marché in April 2015, when the casting of Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was announced⁵.

Dumont described it as his most expensive film, attributing the cost to the movie stars and the period setting: "the money is visible because of the costumes and sets"¹². He said he chose the pre-World War I setting to move away from the contemporary, everyday-life side of his earlier cinema¹².

Place in Dumont's career

Slack Bay followed Dumont's four-part television series P'tit Quinquin (also called Li'l Quinquin), which premiered at Cannes in Directors' Fortnight in 2014 and was watched by about 1.4 million viewers when broadcast in France in September 2014⁵. Both works are murder mysteries set in northern France and investigated by two bumbling detectives, and Slack Bay is a further refinement of the comedic direction Dumont took with the series¹³.

The shift was striking because Dumont had been known for austere, naturalistic films such as The Life of Jesus (1997) and Humanité (1999), the latter a Cannes Grand Prix winner⁵^•¹⁴. Across his eight previous features he had employed only two professional actors, Juliette Binoche in Camille Claudel 1915 and Yekaterina Golubeva in Twentynine Palms; Slack Bay, by contrast, paired movie stars with non-professional actors, casting the Brufort family with amateurs including a real-life father-and-son duo, Thierry and Brandon Lavieville¹³. Dumont declared his comic reference points to be Laurel & Hardy and the French silent comedian Max Linder, and the two inspectors, the rotund Machin (Didier Després) and his pipsqueak sidekick Malfoy (Cyril Rigaux), appear in black suits and bowlers in that mold⁹.

Reception

Critical response was divided. At Cannes, Screen's Jury Grid gave the film an average score of 2.1, with critics ranging from enthusiastic (Michel Ciment) to the lowest rating¹⁵. French press reviews collected by AlloCiné averaged 4.1 out of 5 across 25 outlets, while AlloCiné spectators averaged 2.4 out of 5 from about 3,190 ratings⁷^•⁸. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 64% on the Tomatometer from 80 reviews and 42% from audiences, with the critics consensus noting that "for filmgoers attuned to absurd French farce, its slapstick chaos should deliver just enough belly laughs"⁶.

Reviewers described the film in sharply different terms. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called it "very strange and very funny" and "theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little overextended"¹⁶; his colleague Simran Hans, reviewing the same release, found it a "dreary" black comedy that "isn't exactly funny"¹⁷. RogerEbert.com's Cannes coverage called it "likely to be recognized as one of the more truly original films" of that festival⁹. The film won the Best Film Award at the Seville European Film Festival³.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1998 to 2024

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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