A Disappointing Continuation

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This movie is quite unique, an unlikely mix of social comedy and gender drama. Cinematography is beautiful, even haunting sometimes. The harsh French Northern landscape is wonderful, providing for a previously unseen contrast of deep blue, beige and grey. Slapstick and dark, bizarre humour are equally present. The plot is quite simple. The bourgeoisie is copiously mocked, while the villagers are depicted as brutal yet somehow faithful. The actors are great, specially Binoche and Luchini, all extravagant and whimsical. Unfortunately the soundtrack sounds sometimes inadequate, the emotion coming from the music doesn't seem to fit in with the emotions displayed by the characters and situations. This is only low point for me (or maybe I failed to understand some subtle intention from director Bruno Dumont). Otherwise, it's a brilliant movie and I recommend to all cinema lovers.

I happened to be on the site at the time of the shooting. So, I looked forward to seeing the produced work. Enormous was my disappointment, up to revulsion, and nevertheless that film that I still dislike keeps haunting me. The French press in its large majority covered with praise - speaking even about poetry - what for me stays as a nauseating demonstration by the absurd, the grotesque and the vulgar. All the professional actors contributing to the ludicrous by a voluntarily excessive overplay, up to the point of raising extreme annoyance, such as throughout the galloping hysteria of the character played by Juliette Binoche. At the heart of the exceptional beauty of Côte d'Opale - however watered down by the cinematography -, all characters are grotesque to the excess: the painting of a degenerate humanity, from the fishermen's poor family of mussels pickers poured into cannibalism, up to the microcosm of a bourgeois family enriched by the textile industry. ... Every character but one, about whom for quite some time one can not help wandering whether she is a girl disguised as boy or whether he is a boy disguised as girl. A sensitive character in such ambiguity, till nowadays a pariah through ages... Maybe that was the message intended by the director, how could we know?

Let's fall in the hideous, disgusting, sick and bleak mud of a marshy coastal bay somewhere between Boulogne and Gravelines in France, you know where the refugees are slowly rotting away waiting for a miracle to take them across the Channel. The action is at the beginning of the 20th century, before the First World War for sure and the first social upheaval in Nord Pas de Calais in 1906 after the mine accident in Courrières that caused a strike that was broken by Clemenceau's supposedly republican army, but after the first anarchistic upheaval in the coal mines at the end of the 19th century so perfectly described by Emile Zola as a call to all capitalist bourgeois to move their consonants around and become paternalist if they don't want to finish burned up at the stake or broken through on the wheel by the emerging Marxists already known as communists. The film in this no man's land of "Who-Know-Where" concentrates on three sets of people.First the local sailors just pick mussels from the rocks along the coast but do not have any boats to go fishing out at sea. And in the summer they make some centimes, meaning some pennies, by carrying tourists, vacationers, rich bourgeois from Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing across the bay in their own arms. To improve their starving diet they just kill one or two from time to time to add some meat to their poor regimen. Cannibalism, you will say. But you are wrong about it. It is plain survival of those who have the sharpest teeth.The big family of textile bourgeois from Tourcoing, is so inbred that we could doubt they are nothing else but a reborn personification of Tutankhamun, the twisted, humpy, sickly descendant of several generation of inbreeding from brother to sister. The master of the family has a hump and walks like a half-crushed beetle. His wife is hardly better though she is apparently coming from a slightly more distant branch, many second removed cousin, though her brother who is maybe brother in law of the head of the family, or maybe just cousin, or maybe nephew, who knows really since it is the same thing anyway, is not brilliant either and is probably slightly autistic. The head of the family and his wife have two daughters and nothing special about them. The sister of the head of the family has a son, Billie, whose father is doubtful and could be either her own brother or their father, meaning the woman when a teenager was used both by the brother and the father of the lot. That son Billie is the most beautiful perversion of incestuous inbreeding. He is a boy who dresses like a girl and at times when he is bored he is a girl who dresses like a boy. He is courting the adult son of the local fishing family, till that son discovers that girl who dresses like a boy is actually a boy.Add to that the secondary little servants of this rotting society. The priest is innocuous, except that he uses his French language haphazardly. He says "Pêchez en paix!" as if he did not know that may mean both "Fish in peace" or "Sin in peace." The point is he probably means both which is untranslatable in English. The cops, an inflated fat detective, Mr. Machin, meaning, among several dozens of words, "contraption," "doohickey," "gadget," "gizmo," "thingumabob," "thingumajig," "thingummy," "contrivance," and his assistant, definitely fit and slim. And the detective is so full of air that he ends up flying in the sky till some bored soldier shoots the air out of him and makes him descend back onto the surface of the earth. The soldiers are innocuous and valueless except that the colonel at the head of them does not know how to play the bugle he faithfully pretends to sound.And that's it, plus finger-licking nice choice morsels from human bodies cooked in their own blood. Who wants some more foot? The satire is so thick with innuendo and grossness that you will be grossed out. Full stop, period, end of the game. As for the French they speak it is either some snobbish French or some local Picard dialect, anyway, the one like the other, out of reach of any normal humane and civilized person. Don't you try to understand the two linguos or linguas, or you may end up finding out it is even more disgusting than you may have ever thought. Treat it as the language of the prehistoric animals that came before Homo Sapiens and from which we are "unluckily" descending.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Bruno Dumont made a Bruno Dumont film in his original region with real inhabitants. Like Li'l Quinquin, some actors are amateurs, some are pros, sadly...There is no real plot here, no story. Just some days in the North of the France in the 1910's. There are some poetry, comedy, but all of the film is made by the situation of the actors, amateur or pro. The professional are to overdo : Binoche and Luchini are sometimes good, often to much, and so bad... The amateurs voices are always hard to understand, even if your are french. Maybe with the subtitle will be better.I like this film, the photo are not so good (first film for the director in digital) the colors are usually blurry. There is no real story, the actors are inaudible or to overdo, it's hard to understand, the end are (for me ) not good... But ... i like it ! It's funny, shabby, unhealthy, beautiful, full of love, with no mockery. The director like is region, the people from there (like the Redneck in the USA) and made fun with their reputations. It's a little jewel of burlesque, like a Belgian film.It's a unusual film, don't except a traditional thing. Take It As It Comes.