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Movie review of Under the Sand.

by Janey | 2002.10.19

An ex-boyfriend from several years ago used to complain to me that I only liked films in which nothing happened. He was extremely impatient with many films that are my favorites, but given the films that he did enjoy, I suspect that his taste is more typical than mine is. I can't recommend the film Under the Sand without that caveat, but for those who don't mind a quiet film in which there is more subtext than action, Under the Sandis a relief from the mediocre and frenetic films that are currently in the mainstream movie houses.

Early in the film, Marie (Charlotte Rampling) naps on the beach while her husband, Jean (Bruno Cremer), goes for a swim. When she wakes, Jean has disappeared. What follows is a delicate meditation on the nature of grief, as director Francois Ozon shows us Marie in all of her most revealing moments, and he holds nothing back. Grief can look an awful lot like insanity, and Ozon walks a very fine line between two Maries: one a bereft woman for whom we can feel deep compassion and the other a lunatic who cannot accept the fact of her husband's death.

We can empathize with many of Marie's coping mechanisms - who among us does not talk to people who are not there? We all rehearse and replay conversations, whether silently or aloud. That Ozon shows us Jean participating in conversations with Marie only reinforces the notion that we, the audience, seeing through her eyes and therefore in her head, are not separate from her, which makes it a little bit uncomfortable when she moves intermittently toward madness.

This device does not work perfectly for me. As much empathy as I could feel for Marie's conversations with Jean, as much as I can identify with the impulse to buy a gift for a lost loved one, still I just wanted to give Marie a shake when she tells her lawyer that she'll consult with Jean regarding his bank account. Her pain is much more painful for me when I see myself reflected in her behavior, and moments like this made me self conscious for her and thereby removed me from her head and the moment.

Her friends' efforts to bring her back into reality are as irritating to the audience as they are to Marie, even while Marie's resistance is equally infuriating both to her friends and to us. Rampling's performance is delicately meticulous, particularly in the scenes with Vincent (Jacques Nolot), with whom she tentatively begins and then cruelly ends a relationship.

The film works best at its edges - the beginning and the end. Ozon manages to establish the 25 year relationship between Jean and Marie with almost no dialogue but merely by a lingering gaze at their routine. The slightest air of melancholy in these early scenes make all explanations of Jean's disappearance plausible - accidental drowning is most likely, of course, but suicide isn't out of the question, nor is, as Jean's mother suggests, the idea that he left Marie and his life to start over someplace else.

From the moment that Marie receives the call saying that a body has been recovered, the film progresses perfectly, with Marie forced into some internal recognition that Jean is in fact dead and, with superhuman strength, overcoming that certainty in order to find again the security of possibility.

After suffering with Marie through most of the film, unclear exactly how seriously to take her delusion, we are provided a moment of clarity in the slightly acerbic scene between Marie and her mother-in-law, after which Marie's struggles to maintain her pretense take on a slightly sharper focus and become both more explicitly conscious and more worthy of our sympathy. On hearing that a body has been recovered from a fisherman's net, the older Madame Drillon says, "Jean always liked to fish." Marie snaps, "You'll be locked in an insane asylum." "Not before you," her mother in law responds. In that moment, both women are completely revealed and from then on, all I wanted for Marie was for her to find a way to maintain her pretense.

Still, the bottom line in this film is that nothing is really resolved. We watch Marie during her first few seasons without Jean, and then we shift our gaze away. Under the Sandwon't be satisfying for people who need their films to tie into neat little bundles of plot, but for those who don't mind film that, like life, is less bounded by time lines and dramatic progression, its quiet beauty will resound in the mind for some time to come.