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Under
the Sand
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In the annals of serious film criticism, there is one especially fond compliment – when it is said of actors that they "really know how to move". This is not a reference to the movement skills which every professional performer must master. Rather, it is a tribute to compelling, rare qualities of physical grace, decisiveness and "cool". Unfortunately, this praise is usually only showered on men – Robert Mitchum, Jean-Pierre Léaud, James Stewart. However, it takes only a few minutes of watching Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand as she walks to a car, lights a cigarette or steals back to a dining table for a last sip of wine to realise that she, too, really knows how to move. Under the Sand is a remarkable film which demands a special kind of attentiveness from its viewers. It is easy to miss the delicacy of its mood and the subtlety of its emotional tension. On the surface, it is an artier version of Truly Madly Deeply (1991), in which Marie (Rampling) struggles with grief after the disappearance at sea of her partner, Jean (Bruno Cremer). As in Truly Madly Deeply – but with less sentiment and laughs – the widow finds herself in a dissociated state, conversing with the ghostly apparition of the departed. One of the ingredients that gives Under the Sand its hushed, fraught air is the rather too-civilised manners of Marie's friends. No one stages an "intervention" into Marie's fantasies or even so much as mentions the uncomfortable truth of the death to her. Marie's journey is a classic one. She negotiates the passage between the dead man in her life and a new, living one, Vincent (Jacques Nolot). More generally, she must come to acknowledge her grief, express it, and then reawaken to the everyday world. Under the Sand is about all this but it also has a more secret and powerful, less familiar agenda. Like Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead (1999), this film explores a kind of nether world between life and death. Marie's subjective experience of dissociation is not merely a passing delusion. In a sense, it leads her to uncover the world as it truly exists in extremis. Director François Ozon (Sitcom, 1997) pays tribute to Alain Resnais, Luis Buñuel and even Alfred Hitchcock in the way he imbues commonplace objects and events, like insects under a rock or the waves on a beach, with an air of poetic mystery and menace. Everything carries intimations of "the other side". Incidentally, another talented French filmmaker, Jean-Claude Brisseau (Noce blanche, 1989), has offered what can serve as the best description of the mode of Under the Sand in his recent comments comparing Resnais and Hitchcock: "One of the things which most interests me in Resnais is his manner of filming reality and its flatness, as if it were a suspense movie – using travelling shots which can recall Hitchcock's mise en scène in the first part of The Birds (1963). This gives in Resnais the feeling of an icy dramatisation of a stark reality, a dramatisation which opens onto an anguish. I have always felt that Resnais' films were an attempt to go and see the other side of reality, the side of death, as if Resnais were basically anxious and afraid. That's not pejorative. It's anguish in the Pascallian sense". Under the Sand's boldest gesture is to present sexuality and sensuality as the central bridges between the realms of life and death. The sex and masturbation scenes, while hardly explicit, have immense power. We see, in Rampling's face and body, the vibrations of this strange passage between worlds. But even these intimate acts are also infected by the dissociation which rules Marie – as in the disarming scene where she bursts out laughing because Vincent is "too light" on top of her in comparison with Jean. To iron out Under the Sand into a linear, conventional, psychological journey is to reduce its richness and mystery. Marie's path to enlightenment is never straight or entirely unambiguous. Scenes in which she responds to officials involved with Jean's disappearance, or seeks out her beloved's rather disconcerting mother, are full of hints that raise nagging, unresolved questions. Ozon has bravely chosen a subject in which the subterranean currents of emotion, the flux of identity and the ambiguities of experience can never be mapped completely onto a conventional three-act structure. After two viewings, I am still not convinced that Ozon has been able to successfully create his own, new structure from such complex material. There are flat moments and repetitions – risks that Ozon must inevitably take. What is perfectly clear, however, is the superb result of the close collaboration between the talented Ozon and Rampling at her finest. Watching her move, physically or emotionally, is cinema at its zenith. MORE Ozon: 8 Femmes, 5 x 2, Short Films of François Ozon, Swimming Pool © Adrian Martin January 2002 |
