Editor’s Note: The following review is part of our coverage for the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. For more information please visit www.festival-cannes.com/en or follow the Cannes Film Festival on Twitter.
Again mining comedic gems that verge on crossing the void towards farce Bruno Dumont’s Ma Loute reappraised many of his troupes from earlier more inaccessible films in the Competition entry here on the Croisette. Again working with establishing actors alongside non-professionals he seems to hit on a range that varies from Monty Python to The League Of Gentleman and somehow fits his own La Vie Du Jesus and L’Humanite.
. . . a range that varies from Monty Python to The League Of Gentleman and somehow fits his own La Vie Du Jesus and L’Humanite.
It is often said that the best journalists can write equally for the quality press as well as the more down market tabloids. By that rationale it could be surmised that Dumont has latched onto comedy for further increase his audience reach. That would be a stretch too far and lead to accusations of cynicism, which would be undeserved.
Ma Loute takes place in Dumontland: Northern France’s Côte d’Opale in 1910 and focuses on two families from different sides of the track: the aristocratic Van Peteghems: husband and wife André and Isabelle (Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), their daughters, André’s sister Aude (Juliette Binoche) and her progeny Billie (Raph), a beautiful androgynous gender neutral teenager who attracts the attention of the sire of the Bruforts: Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville). Father of the Brufort tribe is boat skipper ‘The Eternal’ (Thierry Lavieville) who lives with his wife and La Loute’s younger brothers in a rundown borderline shed. They make their living picking mussels and ferrying rich holidaymakers across the water, even sometimes carrying the passengers.
What with Ma Loute and Alain Guiraudie’s Rester Verticle Cannes ’16 is shaping up to be weirdly strange clash between the Social Realists and the Quixotic Imaginarium of Chancers…
In Slack Bay (the locale) tourists have been going missing and called to investigate are a pair of inept police officers that recall Dumont’s previous film P’tit Quinquin and other comedic duos from Abbott & Costello to Martin and Lewis. The answer to the disappearances is not exactly a cinematic secret as Dumont quite early on in the film shows the Bruforts to be cannibals and munching down on some bourgeois broth!
This art house play on the slapstick film never ceases to amaze and double take, images Dumont conjures from very little are given significance by the approach of a ramping up of ridiculous over acting on the part of the professional actors, Binoche for one seems to relish the opportunity to bounce over the scenery after she’s finished chewing it. The counterpoint of the nonprofessional actors who play the Bruforts is inspired, especially the supreme lack of judgement that Dumont withholds and actually sympathy and warped respect.
Added to this we have beach boat surfing crashes, fat characters floating away and lady of the manor levitating. None of this should work, but it continues to work and then some. An inspired sideways pile driver that shocks with its lack of shock (unless you count children munching baked fingers).
What with Ma Loute and Alain Guiraudie’s Rester Verticle Cannes ’16 is shaping up to be weirdly strange clash between the Social Realists and the Quixotic Imaginarium of Chancers…
This art house play on the slapstick film never ceases to amaze and double take, images Dumont conjures from very little are given significance by the approach of a ramping up of ridiculous over acting on the part of the professional actors, Binoche for one seems to relish the opportunity to bounce over the scenery after she’s finished chewing it.
