MovieChat Forums > Sous le sable (2001) Discussion > Conflict without resolution....now that'...

Conflict without resolution....now that's brave!

posted 20 years ago by yossarian100
13 replies | jump to latest

SPOILER!

Conflict and resolution. That's what stories are all about. Well not this time. This is seriously a brave thing to do but it works and works well. Charlotte Rampling handles the part with perfection, a difficult task considering they shot the beginning of the film and then sat down to write the rest of it, knowing only they had a body at the end.

The movie is about denial without resolution. The husband drowns and the wife cannot accept it. She imagines him still with her, uses the present tense when she speaks about him, and she even has an affair. When she views the body at the morgue and is presented with evidence that this is the body of her husband, just when you think she's finally accepting the truth, she goes right back into denial. The movie ends with her on the beach, crying. She sees a man standing off in the distance. The man resembles her husband but, of course, it's not. She begins running towards him. That's it.

I loved Charlotte Rampling's performance. I loved the movie. It's honest and that's unusual for a movie. Life does not always provide tidy endings and for many real stories no ending exists.

I was just sitting here thinking how wonderful it would be if more movies were like this. I've often watched movies where there comes a point I think the movie should just stop, not resolve anything, and I'm disappointed when they keep going. I would just like to be left guessing once in awhile, not really knowing how things concluded.

Writing about movies is like dancing about architecture

[–] jaimemartin17 19 years ago

agreed...Rampling is always a strong presence on screen. the whole time the film kept me guessing. exactly-i wish more films would be like this one...what a pleasant surprise!

swimming pool
8 women

were nice as well!
BLAH

[–] Sugarsnap 17 years ago

I totally agree with you guys. The brave absence of tidy resoltion was what made Under the Sand (Sous le sable) such a haunting experience for me. It gave the film tremendous staying power. François Ozon is great at handling this type of challenging material with no easy answers, and he seems to have found a wonderful muse in Charlotte Rampling. She's always been a fine actress, but she's never been used better than in Ozon's Under the Sand and Swimming Pool.

[–] thesnowleopard 17 years ago

I thought it was an excellent portrait of the grieving process when someone disappears and there is no body. Even if a body turns up later, by then, the defenses are in place and it's very hard to let go of them, to accept reality. It is very common for someone grieving to see the dead or missing loved one on every street corner, or even when they aren't really there. This doesn't make you crazy, just in extreme, albeit temporary, denial.

I also thought that it was a good portrait of how people around someone who is grieving for a missing person react with their own kind of denial. The friends and new lover of the wife want to "move on" so badly that they try to rush the wife through her grieving process. They label her crazy and in denial when they are, in fact, rushing to bury her husband before his body is found and he is officially declared dead. The wife's need for certainty makes her convince herself that he's still alive. Her friends' need for certainty makes them try to force her to accept that her husband is dead, even before anyone discovers his body. It's denial either way, regardless of who turns out right in the end. And even then, a mystery remains that only the wife cares about--did he drown accidentally or did he kill himself or was it even perhaps murder (however unlikely that last possibility)?

The mother-in-law is astonishingly vicious, a performance right up there with Nancy Marchand's in The Sopranoes. I think she best exemplifies the wrongness and hypocrisy of the attitudes surrounding the wife. And I agree with those who loved the ending. It was fantastic and wonderfully ambiguous. Exactly the way to end the story with her chasing a ghost.

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[–] little_brother 17 years ago

Agree wholeheartedly! particularly regarding the denial of her friends - it's less than a year for goodness sake! Also the mother-in-law; that scene was superb! Andree Tainsy - she was as powerful as Rampling's wife. I could see how the placating son became the loving husband.

But also the reference to Virginia Woolf, even to the point of quoting her suicide note to Leonard, it is key to the wife's character.

It seems to me that she is making a courageous attempt to recover. She does try, after all, with the new lover, Vincent (with his wonderful eyes, is a credible replacement for Jean) to the point of imagining Jean benignly witnessing their lovemaking. But he turns out to be a such a disappointment with his intrusive offer of help after only one night together.

Then the masturbation scene, where she fantasizes another pair of hands.

She even insists on looking at the decomposing body, in an effort to free herself.

Finally there is the watch. She would have described it accurately to the police, and it fitted that description. To have looked at that watch, which she must have been so familiar with, and to still deny it, does not fit with her search for truth, while to have owned the watch would have finally cut the cord with her husband. At this last hurdle she baulked. Fantastic film!

[–] thesnowleopard 17 years ago

My impression was that when she's on the beach crying, she's finally starting to accept that he's dead. When she sees him down the beach, it's like a last gasp of her delusion. She might just continue as she has been, but I don't think so. She's actually been on a slow journey of reconciling herself to his death; she hasn't been treading water in place. Once she reaches the end of her journey, I think she will be better off than those around her who tried to rush her along. Once she gives him up, it will be because *she* is ready and because she knows that she can do no more for him.

I think that's the true beauty of the film--throughout the story, she is encouraged to cast aside his memory, to forget him. Fault lines, possible and real in their relationship, are cast in her face, especially in that fantastic and brutal scene with her mother-and-law. Yet, she remains true to his memory. This was not a perfect, fairy-tale relationship, but as we see her love tested in the wake of his disappearance, it becomes clear that at least on her side, it was the real thing. She really did love him, warts and all. I think, in the end, she just doesn't want to bury him alive. That's oddly rational.

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[–] 17 years ago

[deleted]

[–] mathmaniac 15 years ago

If the swim suit colors are different, that may be because those trunks were underwater with a decomposing body! The coroner proved it was him when he gave the evidence of the DNA and then - for certain - the dental records matched.

[–] cetaylor3 12 years ago

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.

[–] everybody_is_a_critic 16 years ago

I also appreciated the unresolved ending. She could be running toward a mirage - no one is there. Or perhaps it is Jean, and she is still imagining him. Or maybe it is an altogether different person and her delusion is shattered once more. I would like to recommend another movie that also leaves one in 'limbo' and that is the movie "Limbo" by John Sayles. I love an unresolved ending when done well.

[–] yossarian100 16 years ago

Thanks for the heads up regarding Limbo by John Sayles. Netflix has it so I added it to the top of my rental queue.

"I left everything, and everyone. But no one, no one has ever left me."

[–] guyheno-1 15 years ago

"Birth" with Nicole Kidman shares the same theme.
Both movies also end with a powerful beach scene. Kidman tries to move on, gets married to another man but then totally breaks down by the ocean.

[–] blacknyellowsquid 8 years ago

I had an echo of Birth when watching this too. But that movie was really ...weird lol. I mean

[–] Bree_33 13 years ago

The frustratingly inconclusive ending is just too European for words.

Fac ut gaudeam. ~