Under the Sand

Marie is very traumatized when Jean disappears very unexpectedly at the beach. I think it’s so traumatic because she can’t mourn over a body that can’t be found. In other words, she has no closure and can therefore still entertain the idea that he might actually be alive. In my English class, we’ve discussed how traumatic events are represented. Many believe that when a traumatic event occurs, the person or people who witness it are so shocked by it that they can’t actually understand it or take it in when it happens. Eventually, they might grow to remember or understand what happened better, but what does come back is fragmented. I think that Ozon is working with the same idea in this movie. Marie doesn’t understand what happened, so her experience is mirrored for us.

Marie denies that her husband disappeared and represses memories connected to his disappearance. She speaks of him as if he was still around and imagines him actually appearing and speaking to her. I don’t think she knows how to cope because she hasn’t seen a dead body, and can still cling to the most infinitesimal chance that he is alive. She probably feels that she should delay mourning until she knows exactly what happened to him. So to try to get past the trauma of the situation she tries to pretend that nothing happened at all. She tries to push away threatening memories. One example of this is when she tries to move away from this traumatic memory by moving to a different apartment. She ends up not being able to move there though because something in the view reminds her of Jean. I think it is finally after she receives a call from the morgue that she tries hardest to face that her husband died. Suddenly she changes her tactic of dealing with this situation from ignoring it to exposing herself to it completely. Marie visits her mother-in-law so she can tell her that a body that might be Jean’s was found. She also faces the possibility that it might have been suicide when she tells her mother-in-law that Jean was taking medication. When in the morgue, she demands that she see the recovered body so that she can finally be certain of Jean’s death and hopefully begin the process of mourning.

I don’t think Marie wants to believe that Jean is dead for a few reasons. One is that he was such an important and constant part of her life. She said at one point that her relationship with Jean had always been her priority. I think that she uses the fact that nobody is sure of what happened to him as an excuse to hold onto the smallest hope that he’ll return alive and well. Another reason she might not want to face his death is that if he died, she has to wonder why: was it an accident or did he actually commit suicide? If he did commit suicide, why did he? It seems that she is afraid to answer such questions because then she would feel responsible in some way for what happened. It’s possible that she feels guilty in some ways because he asked her if she wanted to swim with him before he disappeared. Or she might feel like she was not a good wife, and could have contributed to his depression, as her mother-in-law suggested. But if she continues to think that he didn’t die, then she doesn’t have to implicate herself.

Marie went down to the beach to mourn because it was the last place she saw Jean. So it seemed like the movie was going to end with her finally confronting everything she ran away from. She was digging her hand into the sand as if she was unburying all that she buried from her consciousness (under the sand, like the title). However, when she gets up and runs toward an illusion (of her husband), it is clear that she is not committed to facing reality and trying to move on. She still can’t accept the truth, so she runs away from it toward an image. Since she is so broken by her husband’s death, she might have decided to drown herself in the same place that he drowned. She seems not to have much of any hope, so death is the only way to make everything right.