Customer Reviews

Under the Sand

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charlotte Rampling gives a fantastic performance in this slow, but elegantly portrayed film of a woman's grief over the disappearance of her husband on a holiday to the seaside. Her manner of self assured optimism in the face the loss of her husband is deeply moving in its strident motives of self-deception. The long shots of Rampling contemplating the empty space of her apartment and the unexpected appearance of her husband leave the viewer gripped in anticipation of whether or not her fabricated reality will continue or shatter around her feet. Most fitfully, her character is a lecturer on fiction and is discussing with her students Virginia Woolf's `The Waves.' This is an interesting reference to Woolf's great experimental novel dealing with ageing, loss and the timorous bonds between individuals. Rampling's character inhabits the struggle with dealing with these elements in life and embodies a contradiction in their acceptance that cannot be reconciled. What this film captures so elegantly are the physical touches and familiar routines of a long-term love. The habit of her love for her husband is represented in her movements and the interaction she has with her husband's "ghost" or "shadow." The end, purposely and rightfully, does not give away whether or not her denial over her husband's death will be accepted or eternally refused. This is a haunting, delicately beautiful film.

Under the Sand may be the most astoundingly beautiful film all year, not to mention one of the most heartbreaking portraits of grief on the screen since The Sweet Hereafter. It's sober, solemn, and somehow liberating--I feel more human now that it's over, and seeing it has become a pleasurable thing to look back on.

The film, about a woman in her fifties (Charlotte Rampling) whose husband disappears on the beach and is never seen again, is a fascinating examination of loss and a profoundly moving film about love. It is fiercely unsentimental, almost bitterly angry at times, in the way that we curse those we love who have left us without warning. The brilliant final shots, which do absolutely nothing to explain what really happened to the husband, or what will happen to the wife, make exactly the right ending.

Rampling is the most perfect thing about the film--never before has her total prescence been so apparent on the screen, and the effect is astonishing. Time has only worked to ripen her unusual, angular radiance; she's luminous and sensual in every act we watch her perform. The film's images, each so clean and smooth, unable to contain their own natural brilliance, are sheer poetry: fingers, clutching sand; the way that light and water can distort the human figure; the buttering of a piece of toast; finally, the canvas of the human body and the beauty of its conjunction with another in an act of love.

Under the Sand is a reminder of what love and loss really are--you can see them in nearly every shot of Charlotte Rampling's unforgettable, candid face.

François Ozon is a rare director, one who takes a simple story, places it in the eyes and bodies of his cast, and simply lets the tale tell itself. SOUS LE SABLE (UNDER THE SAND) is an unforgettable film experience that probes deeply into our psyches, hearts, and reason: how do we cope with sudden death?

Opening quietly in the French countryside, a loving middle-aged couple begins a brief vacation in a family house, quietly and lovingly going about removing dustcovers, opening shuttered windows - settling in for a time of being alone together. Marie (Charlotte Rampling) is a professor of English in Paris (her specialty is Virginia Woolf) and Jean (Bruno Cremer) is her retired husband. Their long-term love is palpable: Ozon provides almost no dialogue, as none is needed to establish this special relationship, so powerful is the non-verbal communication between Rampling and Cremer. They visit the beach the next day and while Marie is sunbathing, Jean goes for a swim - and never returns. Marie searches for him, engages lifeguards, and ultimately returns to Paris, trembling but intact. Months later, while Jean is never found, we see Marie reacting as though he still exists. She visualizes him in various situations and the two actors (yes, Jean is present in these scenes) interact as though nothing has changed. But Marie's friends note with great concern that she is 'delusional' and make various attempts for her to seek professional and emotional help. When news eventually arrives that Jean's body has been found, she internally denies this possibility but eventually returns to the vacation house town to identify the bloated corpse. Even at this point, though obviously in shock, she denies that the corpse is that of her beloved Jean. She walks back to the site where she last saw Jean and in the distance a figure rekindles her hope...

Charlotte Rampling delivers a performance wholly committed. She communicates the spectrum of feelings of this challenged strong woman with her eyes, her gazes in the mirror, her interaction with her class of students, her friends, her admirer with such power that makes her Marie a wholly credible creature stricken by loss yet surviving in her chosen manner. It is one of the great performances of cinema. The entire small cast of this film is perfection. Ozon is a magical director and continues to prove he is one of the most honest and quietly powerful figures in today's cinema. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, July 05

A brilliant companion piece to Swimming Pool, Francois Ozon's Under the Sand similarly casts Charlotte Rampling as the lead female, here in a tale of loss. Interestingly, in both films, she has a position of someone not only literate but directly involved in literature. In Swimming Pool, she is a writer; here, she is an instructor of literature.

This is key to understanding how subtle Ozon is in these two masterful films. Parallel in both works is the fusing of fantasy and reality. In Under the Sand, Marie's (Rampling) husband disappears and her fantasy life--reinforced, it is implied, by her profession--blossoms into imagining her husband still with her, long after his disappearance, and, as well, feeling hands stroking all parts of her body in one amazing scene. More subtly, Ozon here, as in Swimming Pool, uses the mix of French and English--both language and culture--to emphasize the blurring of fantasy and reality. When Marie's best friend--like her, another bilingual English woman married to a French man--speaks to her, it is sometimes in French, sometimes in English, indicating the fluidity of thought and feeling between two modes of existence. Marie's friend sympathizes with her loss--French--but wants her to face up to the reality of what has happened and continue with her life--English.

Similarly, Marie's new lover tells her that he thinks of the English as morbid. But he is French and tells her this in French; it shows, Ozon says, that there is a desire in the French to feel deeply, contrasted with the English who desire to think deeply. Such is the implication here. Marie IS French, though born English, and it is just this fusing of the two cultures within herself that results in her confusion of fantasy and reality.

However, it would be too easy to equate French with fantasy and English with reality; Ozon does not really do this as simplistically as the above seems to indicate. Instead, he does imply this in several scenes, but as well shows us Marie telling her friend, in English, that Jean (her lost husband) is taking a nap or out for a walk when he has not been with her for a year or so. That is, Marie herself is not able to distinguish the difference in the two cultures flowing in her blood--not able to differentiate as simply as all that the difference between fantasy and reality, between thought and feeling. This is brought to a head in the great ending sequence, not revealed here, in which Jean is, perhaps, not lost after all. Or is he?

Ozon is a superbly intelligent filmmaker who closely investigates what and how we think and feel, delicately exposing the nuances of behavior and how they determine who we really are. The subtlety shown in his work is truly astonishing and marks him as one of the great French directors working today.

AND Thank God for creating this lovely creature!

She's quite, quite timeless and always the epitome of excellent taste, manner and beauty. This time she's the wife - the [better?] half of a middle-aged marriage, a couple still very much in love on vacation - spending time at the beach, but then he disappears - completely, and we're not quite sure if he will be found, or if he is found ...... a sinister journey .....

It asks the question - How long can we remember the Dead? Can we really recall the voice, the smell, the intimate touches shared? AND if we do - how long can we hold this memory? No, it's not 'Donna Flor and her Two Husbands' [or for that matter the odd remake with Sally Field]. This one's so real and Miss Rampling under the expert hands of director Francois Ozon pulls us through this hall of crackling mirrors. It's Euridice searching for Orpheus, or is it?

Not wanting to betray more of this odyssey, it's best to snuggle up on the couch on a rainy day, alone, [small fire blazing in the hearth, waves crashing outside, small sherry, dry], and watch this story unfold.

A profound journey, hypnotic, AND somewhat of a 6th sense ending - maybe .......... that's up to the viewer!

More Miss Rampling, please!

a married couple of 25 years goes on a vacation. one day at the beach, the husband decides to go for a swim.

only he doesn't return.

and so begins " under the sand, " a tale about a woman who spends the the length of the movie wondering if he is dead or alive. she also tries to deal with her grief. she wonders if she was the reason for his dissapearance. marie, played by charlotte rampling, gives a riveting performance of a woman who cloaks herself in denial to the point that she keeps her husband alive, even as the signs become obvious that he is dead.

francois ozon's narrative is straightforward, though with the prescence of bruno cremer as jean, marie's late husband, in later scenes, one might suspect the narrative is nonlinear,bringing anxiety and tension to the story.

marie does her best to move on. even becoming involved with another man but her husband still haunts her-literally. one scene shows her with her lover as her late husband watches on, giving it an eerie feeling.

this film is a perfect testimony about the hold a person can have on another, even when they are no longer around...

Superb acting. Charlotte Rampling is amazing as always. Very realistic portraying of people unable to accept reality of the loss... Emotional and realistic, this movie will make you think about it for days after.

This summer Hollywood is obsessed with trying to create special effects that do reality one better, having sold its soul to the Pixar devil in the process. Ironic then that the most "radical" film you will see this year shocks by not upping the gross-out quotient, body count or stupidity factor, but by subverting most of underlying assumptions that have polluted American cinema for years. Shocking, then, that a film would insist that beauty has little to do with age or physical appearance, that an audience can be trusted to embrace ambiguity and make its own decisions (Spielberg are you listening? Of course not), and that profound grief can both entertain and offer deep emotional sustenance.

I do want to offer a warning: critics, entertainment journalists, and, sadly, even the description on this page are hell-bent on making sure that audiences know all there is to know about a film and form an opinion before they even experience it (consensus at any cost!), so don't read anything about this film before you go see it. I am still seething that the reviews I read robbed me of the sharing the discovery process that is essential to this film.

But by all means go see it.

Under The Sun is Ozon's most ambitious and sublime film to date. It manages to transcend its echoes of Bunuel, Antonioni, and Polanski due in large part to a mesmerizing performance by Charlotte Rampling. In films as varied as Night Porter, Stardust Memories and The Verdict, Rampling has brought an enigmatic brand of eroticism that lingers in the mind for ages. Sure, like her fans, Rampling is older and wiser, but she is still beautiful and in the right role, she never delivers a false note. In Ozon's film, she gets just the right balance of neurosis, dread, madness, and longing. This is one of the more convincing and truthful films about sex, death, and the daily ravages of time and memory in a very long time. The great European art film is not dead, just somewhat reduced in numbers, but I am happy to report Under The Sand is one of those films.

This is definitely a beautiful, well-filmed movie. The story stays a bit of a mystery throughout. Ms. Rampling is quite good. When I looked at her career and the movies in her filmography, I was surprised to see that such a fine actress really hasn't been in that many good movies. Not a young woman anymore, Ms Rampling is still very alluring. This film has a few erotic moments, but not to the degree that some reviewers are stating. If you like a thought-provoking type of character study and a beautiful loking film this could be a good one for you.