Following his epic drama Li’l Quinquin — which he is currently prepping a sequel to — director Bruno Dumont returned to Cannes last year with Slack Bay, a dark period comedy following an investigation into a series of mysterious disappearances on the beaches of northern France. Led by his Camille Claudel star Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Kino Lorber picked it up for a U.S. release later this spring, and now a new trailer has arrived.
We said in our review from Cannes last year, “The most important innovation, and also this film’s greatest weakness, is its focus on an upper-class family played by well-known actors. Dumont has long proven his aptitude for working with non-professional performers, and his only collaboration with a major star to date, Juliette Binoche in Camille Claudel 1915, turned out just as fruitfully.”
Check out the new trailer and poster below.
The bourgeois and extremely eccentric Van Peteghem family—among them Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi—have settled in for another summer at their cliff-top villa overlooking the picturesque Slack Bay. Their leisurely rhythm of sunbathing and seaside constitutionals is soon interrupted by the arrival of two bumbling inspectors investigating a string of tourists gone missing (and serving full-on Keystone Kops). As the macabre mysteries mount and love blossoms between the family’s genderqueer teen and the son of a local fisherman, Binoche and company ratchet the slapstick up to eleven. It’s no wonder director Bruno Dumont (Li’l Quinquin, Camille Claudel 1915) cites Peter Sellers, Monty Python, and Laurel and Hardy as cinematic influences for his delightful foray into winking, absurdist farce.
Slack Bay opens on April 21st at Film Society of Lincoln Center and Quad Cinema and will expand from there.