snowleopard,
I've liked your comments best of all - they reflect my view as well and, imho, offer a needed addition to the OP focusing on denial when, for me, that was part of a bigger picture of the grieving process and also what this woman's process said about the nature of love when lives together come to feel truly inseparable, "warts" and all ... Separation becomes untenable. There's a sense of living death in her once she is without him ...
I just watched the film again last night - the first time since seeing it back in 2000 at the theater - now via netflix and with a husband and partner who I didn't even know when I first saw the film and thus now having the kind of lived intensity of togetherness that makes the concept of separation all the more palpable in its unacceptability.
Back in 2000, I wrote the following ... I would have chosen to make rather different observations today, i think, but my observations from 2000 still seem valid as well so i'll offer them to this thoughtful and appreciated thread ...
Here was my commentary in 2000:
While 'economy' isn't normally a film feature I would immediately sense and comment on in reviewing a film, if ever there was a movie that exemplified 'economy' in filmmaking from the first second, it is _Under the Sand_, a feat which serves its evocative storytelling so engagingly, a feat which is most notably the director's doing but also derives from the palpably 'real' scripting of small moments and touches of daily life and from the excellent acting. Director Ozon incisively captures the art (and film science) of 'suturing' us into the lives and psyches of the characters by trusting and exploiting our own world knowledge as viewers in less-is-more filmmaking.
It is the eye of the beholder, even more than the ear, which zooms in figuratively if not camera-literally on layer upon layer of rich detail in the everyday life of a couple in its abbreviated opening scenes, revealing so much about their twenty years of developed mutual habit, just in a gesture, an object, a scene cut, a word tone, a crumpled shirt, an applied lipstick, a slurred familiar everyday command, a husband's slight (but momentous) nod upon hearing the wifely answer to a question which we already know enough about them five-minutes-in to realize he was anticipating in advance ... From the first
moment, not a 'wasted' second in its deliciously rich sampling of life and relationship detail (wherein the proverbial devil lies).
Secondly, for me, never have I seen a movie that was more richly a film about the power of cognitive dissonance in our (relationship) lives. While Peter Travers in Rolling Stone has suggested that we see the wife Marie "nearly unravel" in the face of the sudden turn of events, I believe, au contraire, that we witness the awesome internal workings of a mostly unconscious 'keep-it-together-cuz-if I-don't-I'll-fall-apart' dynamic. Saying that Marie "nearly unravels" oversimplifies her process of self-protection (from truth, from the possibility of having 'lived a lie', from serious threat to her self-image, her romanticism, her illusions) in a marvel of portrayal of the mind on overtime precisely to keep one who arguably should
be unraveling from doing that very thing. As I write this now (not during the movie), I feel echoes of the Mary Tyler Moore role in 'Ordinary People' although I would rank Rampling's Marie as a considerably more textured role and portrayal. Powerful. Given its ostensibly traumatic subject matter, it somewhat oddly falls into that specie of films which I find to be more 'intellectual experiences' than 'emotional ones' as I think (quite likely intentionally) Ozon positions us, the viewer, at an emotional 'remove' from Marie's life which mirrors her own previously unexplored 'remove' from her life.
And, again with economy, in a very compact powerful scene between Marie and her mother-in-law, we also gain layers of knowledge about Marie's husband's entire life, what his childhood surely was like and how he unwittingly married 'his mother' in ways the two women are self-protectively oblivious to as they see each other as polar opposites (e.g., both women were controlling in small but petulant ways, both read what they wanted to read into the intentions of the man who linked them, meaning both were "in denial" in a way that makes "in denial" a banal phrase). While it is unabashedly psychological in focus, it is all magically wrapped in a sense of mystery which, for me, gives 'edge' and vitality that sutures you into the mystery if not to Marie herself. I highly recommend _Under the Sand_ as an absolutely unique and captivating film experience.
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