Under the Sand (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

Scoopy's comments in white: 

Major spoilers. I'm going to tell you the entire movie. Given that the plot is more or less irrelevant to your appreciation of the film, the spoiling is probably not a negative thing, but if you don't like spoilers, stop reading.

Marie, a middle-aged French woman (Charlotte Rampling) and her husband take their summer vacation at the beach. The opening moments are filled with the comfortable ennui that older couples settle into after years of marriage. They don't have much to say to each other that they haven't already said, but their discourse is loving and pleasant. They set up their summer hope and prepare for another summer like many before.

The next day, she's tanning when he goes for a swim. She fall asleep. He never returns.

The rest of the film is about her attempts to deal with the emotional trauma of this incident, and the filmmaker's effort to place us inside her POV. Is he dead, or did he walk away? If he is dead, did he commit suicide? The wife doesn't much care for the options. If he's alive, that means he walked away from her forever, without a word, after 25 years. If he committed suicide, she can't help but feel the weight of the responsibility. Even if he drowned accidentally, she can't seem to deal with the grief.

So she pretends that he has never gone. Her life continues as if he were just off on a business trip. At times, she sees him and talks to him. The director is deliberately ambiguous about the meaning of her denial. Is she losing her grip on reality? Maybe. Or maybe she's just doing what we all do when our significant partner is missing from our lives, and we feel lonely. Sometimes we have imaginary conversations with them as if they were there. As Freud's short cousin, Sleepy Freud, used to say, there's nothing insane about talking to God. It's only when God starts talking back that you have to worry. Or, to be more scientific about it, imaginary conversations and fantasies can be therapeutic as long as you realize that they are imaginary and fantastic. Does Rampling realize it? The filmmaker is non-committal.

One thing that the film is not ambiguous about (and perhaps it should be): the husband is dead. The police find a body, swimming trunks, a watch - everything is a perfect match, including a DNA match with the husband's mother. But Rampling can't accept it. She says that it isn't her husband's watch. The policeman says 'but you already identified the swimming trunks, and this watch is a perfect match for the description you gave us". She can offer no sensible answer. Her position is that she bought the watch for her husband, and if it were his, she "would know it".

Marie enters a relationship, but she can't get away from the fact that her husband is still with her, in a sense. The man is considerate, but the relationship makes her feel uncomfortable.

The film is essentially a character study about Marie's coping, or failure to cope. There are some moments evocative of Hitchcock or Peter Weir, in which routine everyday events take on a powerful significance that they would not have without the context of the missing man. For example, when Marie gets her annual check-up, the doctor's office asks her to play for her husband's appointment as well. What? When was that appointment? You can sense her hope that the date of his appointment would be after the disappearance, and then feel her utter despair when she realizes the appointment took place immediately before they left for the beach - did he kill himself because of some unnamed medical fear that he could not share with her? 

Then Marie meets with her husband's crochety elderly mother, and the old buzzard seems to think her son was miserable, and just walked out. Marie prefers the suicide theory. Neither of those theories fits the facts of the film, however, because the husband asked Rampling to go on that fatal swim with him. After all, he was alone only because she was tired. And the coroner found that he struggled against drowning, but was overcome. So the suicide angle, the walking away, and the Hitchcockian elements, are merely to show how Marie's own psychology is operating, not to overlay a mystery into the plot. 

Suicide is on her mind, not his.

There is no real mystery, except the vague ending.

My guess is that she committed suicide because that was so powerfully foreshadowed in the film, and the finality of the autopsy removes her last ray of hope. But any number of other interpretations would fit.

The reason I wrote out that complete "spoiler" description is because I'm about to tell you that this is a terrific movie, and you need to know precisely what kind of terrific movie, so you won't blame me for renting something that, to you, totally sucks. When we started doing this, Tuna and I resolved to write a new kind of movie review. Most movie reviewers tell you what they thought of the movie. We try to give you the mental picture you must have to determine what you will think of the movie. 

In the case of this film, I was impressed with it. Most movie reviewers were impressed with it. Many other people with similar tastes will love it. On the other hand, most people will not enjoy it at all. Our job is to help you determine if you are in the small circle of people that will love it, or outside the circle with the average filmgoer. 

Understand first what kind of film it is. It has no plot to speak of, and no action of any kind. It has a mini-mystery, but the mystery only exists to help you understand the mental state of the character. Charlotte Rampling is on camera nearly every minute of the film, and it all takes place within her POV, some of it in the objective world, but much of it entirely in her head. If you might like that kind of film, this is an excellent one.

The director does an expert job at using simplicity as a technique, and Rampling does exactly what she needed to do in this role. 

Tuna's comments in yellow

The short version of my review is "me too." I also think it is very well done,  I enjoyed it, but don't think most moviegoers will be interested. For this film to work, it was vital that the audience immediately like Charlotte Rampling's character, and care about her. The film was scripted such that it had a maximum amount of ambiguity start to finish, asking the audience to figure it out and make decisions about what is really happening. Rampling was perfect in the role, but was more than likely cast because she was one of the few women her age who would agree to wearing a bathing suit on the beach, and doing the nude love scenes. Of course, she has a body that many much younger women would be happy with.

The film ends with a final ambiguity. She has seen proof that her husband died of accidental drowning in a rip current, but she rejects the evidence. In the final scene, she is staring at the ocean, at the exact spot her husband disappeared. She sees a man way down the beach and runs toward him.

Scoop figured that she commits suicide after the film ends. It is a valid possibility, but I think she made the decision to keep her husband with her by not accepting his death, and to live the rest of her life with his memory for company. At any rate, if you can get past the US obsession with youth being synonymous with beauty, Charlotte looked very good, and managed to look sexy in the love scenes, especially in the one where she was on top, and somewhat in charge. This is a three star or better film, but the correct  grade is C+, as it will only appeal to a few viewers.