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UNDER THE SAND Send This Review to a Friend
If you want to see an especially fine performance, catch Charlotte Rampling in "Under the Sand." This is mostly her movie as she portrays Marie, whose husband's sudden disappearance turns her life inside out. The French drama, directed and co-written by Francois Ozon, is structured around the crisis Marie faces, and Rampling is riveting as she sweeps us into the orbit of this character who must come to grips with reality but can't.
I have long admired Rampling's acting, most of all her startling performance opposite Dirk Bogarde in the 1974 film "The Night Porter," a controversial film about a sado-masochistic relationship between a Holocaust survivor and the Nazi who had tortured her in a concentration camp. The new film is her best work in years as she inhabits the character of Marie, who is shocked when her husband Jean (Bruno Cremer) vanishes while she naps at the beach during a vacation. Did he drown? Could it have been suicide? Did he just run away?
Marie has trouble even facing the fact that Jean has gone and she astonishes her friends when she speaks of him in the present tense. Whether with dialogue or pauses, animated movements or the look in her eyes, Rampling is utterly convincing and elicits sympathy for this troubled lady trying to get her life back. At one point she becomes involved with Jacques Nolot as Vincent, but although she is able, even eager, to make love, she can't move into a serious new relationship. Rampling is not shy about exposing her body in the sex scenes, and at 55 she looks great.
Ozon has directed in a manner that emphasizes the mystery, and it helps that Jean, as imagined by Marie, appears physically in various scenes to embody what his wife is thinking. Alexandra Stewart is important in the role of Amanda, Marie's friend who tries to put her in touch with reality. Essentially this is a film about coping with loss, a subject that goes beyond the specific circumstances of this plot and should strike a nerve with viewers who have had to cope with a personal, devastating loss.
Apart from being engrossing, "Under the Sand" is worth seeing to remind oneself of what powerful acting is all about. A Winstar Cinema release.
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