Husband and wife Marie and Jean (Charlotte Rampling and Bruno Cremer) travel from Paris to their country house in the south-west of France. The next day at the beach, Jean disappears. Marie returns home and continues her life, all the while refusing to believe that Jean is dead. Months go by, and even when the police ring to say that they have recovered his body, Marie still 'sees' and talks to Jean in her flat. She visits her mother-in-law who tells her that Jean was suffering from clinical depression; with this knowledge she goes to the morgue to identify her husband's body, Despite the overwhelming evidence that the body is Jean's, she still denies his death.
Films whose opening sequences take place in motorway cafés will generally foreshadow a certain audience apprehension, a kind of dreadful anticipation that all is not as it seems. Harry, He's Here to Help and Lisboa recently reintroduced this generic trend which has its antecedents in Sluizer's masterful The Vanishing. The first few minutes of Under The Sand prolong this idea. The husband-and-wife relationship is wordless; everything is reduced to gestures (the smoking of a cigarette, the re-applying of lipstick) and so the spare mood of Ozon's film is set. We know something is going to happen (everything in these opening shots seem deliberately contrived and forced), but Ozon is not concerned with the 'hows' and 'whys' of Jean's death, but more with the subtle examination of a middle-aged woman coming to terms with loss. In a marked contrast to his previous films (the kitsch, Buñuel-inspired Sitcom and the riotous adaptation of Fassbinder's play Water Drops on Burning Rocks), Ozon's third feature is full of restraint. Whereas those two films were a miasma of fridge-magnet colour schemes and John Waters-esque non sequiturs, Under The Sand is characterised by a minimalist mise-en-scène and carefully understated performances.
Yet despite this sober approach, Ozon is masterful at eking out connections and causalities in his film. Marie is constantly linked to water imagery - the opening shot of the film is a pan from the Seine across to the periphérique, whilst the arrival at the Lix-et-Mixte beach recalls the painterly tones of Edward Hopper. We see her reading aloud from Virginia Woolf's The Waves, and when a suitor (Jacques Nolot) takes her out for a meal, she is initially filmed through an aquarium. It is as if Ozon is connecting the manner of her husband's disappearance with Marie's own existence, and as a result lends the relationship between husband and wife a more profound level of meaning.
The dominating presence throughout is Rampling. With her alabaster skin, hollowed cheeks and down-turned lips, she wanders through the film an ethereal figure. As a highly intelligent woman, the depth of her denial becomes even more puzzling, and yet there lies the nub of the film - after 25 years of marriage, Marie continues to see and talk to Jean and referring to him in the present tense only lends a greater conviction to her exquisite portrayal of bereavement.
This isn't a mystery story. Its narrative complexities are frustratingly unanswered. We, like Marie, are never privy to what happened to her husband. The coroners at the close seems to tie all the loose ends together, but then the rug of narrative closure is pulled from under our feet with Marie's stubborn denials and hallucinatory vision at the end of the film. Rather, Under The Sand is about how people come to terms and cope with the disappearance/death of a loved one, and how the trappings of ordinary life (like buying a tie that matches someone's eyes) becomes infinitely magnified and intensified in the throes of grief.
Reviewed by Ben McCann
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