Ma Loute, stunningly beautiful punk burlesque (review)
In 2016, Dumont, Binoche and Luchini attacked the Croisette with a cannibalistic comedy. An artistic triumph, despite its unfunny gags and its misanthropy.
While Bruno Dumont just released his Star Wars (titled The Empire) at the cinema, France 4 will rebroadcast this evening My Loute. A burlesque comedy carried by a five-star cast (Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi in the lead), which is inspired by a (true) story of cannibals who raged in the North at the beginning of the 20th century. A funny film which intrigued the editorial staff when it was released.
Here is our review, published at the time live from the Croisette:
Two years ago, Bruno Dumont was a little upset that Thierry Frémaux did not deign to make a place for his Little Quinquin in the Official Selection. Today, the resentments are forgotten and all this no longer seems so serious: the Arte series was still a public and critical triumph, and we will undoubtedly look at it one day as a sort of trial run , a vast open-air laboratory from which the filmmaker ended up extracting the impressive My Loute. A new feature which takes up the ingredients of Quinquin to heat them up: here we find this kind of crazy burlesque revolving around a pretext investigation, a duo of blundering and graphic cops, turbulent kids, loud faces, infinite skies, and these majestic pictorial stases coming to tear the police and comic mechanics. The filmmaker adds an experienced element on Camille Claudel 1915 : the association between amateur actors and stars (Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi).
It’s abundant, messy, dissonant. There are some crazy and late-born middle-class people, a family of cannibal fishermen, Inspector Machin who rolls around on the sand of Slack Bay, a romance between a young guy named Ma Loute and the irresistible Billie, who no one really seems to know if it’s a boy or a girl. There are above all two films in one: side A is a sublime melodrama, which twists your guts, a love story transcended by a compelling photo (plastically, the film is undoubtedly what Dumont has done most beautiful and intimidating) . Side B is a comedy both hysterical and “clear line”, a little Tati, a lot Hergé, where the elite of French cinema are invited to self-parody in precious vociferous ridicule (Luchini plays the intellectual who pontificates quoting the great authors, Binoche the drama queen who speaks very loudly). Are they unbearable? Yes, but it’s done on purpose. Do you hate their faces, their excesses, their pantomimes? It’s normal, the bourgeois are detestable.
Once we accept the idea that we are watching the film of a filmmaker at war with the entire world and who has clearly decided to publicly martyr his actors, it remains to be seen how these two films in one manage to communicate. This is the big bet of My Loute : winding together the two threads of Dumont’s inspiration. To put it quickly: its surrealist vein and its Dreyer side. Gags and Grace. The jokes and the ecstasy. We can prefer one to the other, love one against the other, but the idea here is their permanent, uncomfortable friction, and the effect of astonishment that it produces. There is a real love of the precipice in the film, a permanent flirtation with the abyss. Too bad, then, if certain valves fall flat, drag on, or if Luchini never plays the same way from one scene to another. What matters are the WTF jokes, the totally over the top comic savagery, the telluric power of the staging, all directed towards this ultimate goal: to make us roll our hallucinated eyes.
Bruno Dumont can be jubilant. He has achieved a delirious mastery of his art. We applaud, therefore, without being able to help thinking that this cinema, even when it reaches heights, will always be overtaken by its misanthropic background. Everyone here will be sent back to back: the bourgeois, the proles, the fat critics who rave like idiots about the majestic beauty of the northern landscapes (brilliant scene where Luchini admires the raw beauty of a fisherman while eating an omelette). Everyone will get a kick out of it: Binoche, Ma Loute, Billie, the overly sentimental spectator. But that too is a way of causing astonishment. Here is wild and total cinema, lit, which advances without turning around and crushes everything in its path. We bet George Miller will love it?
Frédéric Foubert
Coincoin and the Z’inhumans: what is the sequel to P’tit Quinquin worth? (critical)
