Watching “Slack Bay” is particularly captivating if you are familiar with what Dumont was previously engaged in. For a decade and a half, he had been making formalist parables exploringthe nature of faith and humanity (or rather, inhumanity); in his interviews, a cool breeze of misanthropy and a certain fatigue would seepthrough. Critics, ever fond of categorization, had placed him in the transgressive class of “New Extremity” alongside Gaspar Noé, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, and others. However, “point-blank” is Dumont’s method, and if he decided to unleash his inner trickster, what’s so surprising about that? To get trapped in a single identity, lulling the festival audience—what a bore! To challenge viewer’s patience with something else, with conveyor-belt absurdity?—why not?

 As the Van Peteghems’ noble lineage deteriorates within their villa “of pure marble,” and the Bréforts, having descended into cannibalism, terrorize the beach surroundings with their rustic appetites, Inspector Machin and his assistant—a Laurel and Hardy-like duo, one fat and the other thin—bumble through an investigation into the vanishing of carefree tourists. Their authority, however, proves as dubious and pathetic as their appearance: the rotund inspector (Machine!) continues to roll mechanically from scene to scene until he eventually flies away for good. In other episodes, family patriarch André (Fabrice Luchini) shows interest in sand yachting, albeit with life-threatening risks; his lachrymose wife Isabelle, portrayed by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, levitates above a Virgin Mary statue; the eccentric Aunt Aude (Juliette Binoche) acts outanother bout of neurotic nonsense; the fishermen—embodiments of pure beauty, according to André—persist in their existence on the fringe of asceticism and ignorance, all filling the comicstrip with garish hues.

Amidst this chaos, Billy Van Peteghem, grappling with his sexual identity, attempts to halt the endless grimacing and to bridge the class dividethrough a romance with the eldest Bréfort offspring, Ma Loute (“What’s a ‘Ma Loute’?” Aude muses upon first meeting the guy. “I don’t know, madame”), until the latter, ferrying his love across the bay, discovers something his peasant heritage never prepared him for.

All this European euphoria evokes Chekhovian sketches in the spirit of Mikhalkov’s “Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano,” where provincial nobles, amidst their amusements, teach serfs to mow, and then, in fits of generosity, give away old frocks. Yet theabsurdity grows stale, drifting like an unmooredboat in a becalmed, secluded bay. The social order remains immutable—everyone is on their own and for themselves—Dumont, whose misanthropy hasn’t disappeared by genre shift, perhaps knows this better than others. The poor will hunger, the rich will indulge in incest, and the positive uncertainty in this collectivespectacle will be more fitting, in its own way, than any attempts to reconcile the partieswith negotiations.