The Mubi streaming service is showing Slack Bay (2016), a film by the French director Bruno Dumont. The film is a period comedy drama that explores the discombobulations that derive from the light and space of the sea…a sort of deconstruction of the aquatic cure

Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is an English novel that does the same thing in relation to the rural idyll. Slack Bay is a comedy police procedural…set against the wide sandy beach and dunes of the northern French coast (Wissant). And with a spectacular neo-Egyptian house at the centre of the action.