From a certain point of view, like David Lynch in Blue Velvet (1987) discovering a deadly swarm of ants under the somewhat too calm and orderly beauty of a landscape, François Ozon has always looked “under the sand “. He never ceases to dig into the surface of beings and things to reveal the monstrosity, sometimes grotesque, sometimes repugnant, of human nature.

The simplicity of Sous le sable is matched only by the confusion it inspires. In the opening, Marie (Charlotte Rampling) drives with her husband, Jean (Bruno Cremer), to their home in the Landes. Laconic and customary journey of an old couple, whose habits and intimate mutual knowledge have not overcome the loving tenderness they feel for each other. The concrete daily routine distills almost imperceptibly something more tragic, which would immediately have to do if not with the promise of nothingness, at least with absence.

This occurs the next day, during a beach scene precise as a stab, brutal as a clap of thunder in a serene sky. Marie, lying on the sand, is reading a book, while Jean has gone swimming. Suddenly, Marie stands up, worried, the camera, which films her from behind, performs a rapid and striking rotation on her face: we know that something irreparable has happened.

Subtle staging

The disappearance of Jean, of whom we do not know if he fainted in the wild or if he really drowned, inaugurates a new season of the film that this doubt, as in the best thrillers, will not stop haunt. The staging, extraordinarily economical and subtle, does not really make it possible to decide between the realistic hypothesis (he is alive, but his wife cannot, for an unknown reason, reveal his disappearance) and the metaphysical variation (the film is the stream of consciousness of a woman who cannot bring herself to mourn the loss of her loved one).

This indecision gives the film its power of fascination and reveals its deep nature, which is precisely that of cinema: a disturbing mix between real presence and the view of the mind. Sous le sable resembles a long confrontation between a face and a shadow. The face, resplendent and sovereign, of Charlotte Rampling evokes the enigmatic triumph of beauty at the moment of its vacillation. The shadow, both heavy and elusive, of Jean, that of passing time, which we would like to abolish and which nevertheless continues to insinuate itself into each wrinkle that Marie touches in front of her mirror.

Discreetly placed under the auspices of Honoré de Balzac (Marie reads Le Lys in the valley at the beach) and Virginia Woolf (she teaches The Waves at the university), this film is dominated, like the hero of the first, by a ghost and takes the form in which the second has defined life: “A luminous halo, a transparent envelope where we are enclosed from the birth of our consciousness until death. »