Disappearance Sous le Sable (Below the sand) is a film by the young French director François Ozon. I love the French author cinema of Truffaut, Rohmer and Chabrol. Especially the first two have made films where conversation is essential. Ozon's film is different. Conversation is quite peripheral here. The film shows the slow psychical break-down of a woman who has lost her husband. She simply does not accept the reality and almost succeeds. I would call this an impressionist film which gives a very exact picture of what goes on in that woman. The more the story goes on the more reality takes over.

Spoiler alert! (though the plot is not so important really) Jean and Marie are a middle-aged couple who go on holiday to the Landes south of Bordeaux where Jean owns a holiday cottage. They do not talk much but they seem to get on ok. The first time they go to the beach Jean asks Marie if she wants to go swimming with him. She says no and never sees her husband alive again. There are no huge waves. It is a normal sunny seaside day. The film is about how Marie copes with the loss of Jean. Even though it becomes more and more evident that he has committed suicide she won't accept that he is dead. She lives on as if Jean had only left for a short trip. When the police phones back a couple of months later that they have found a body who fits her description of Jean she does not call back. She does not want to know. She has an affair with an acquaintance who is interested in her only after having talked about it to Jean in her imagination before. When Jean's old mother who apparently never liked her tells her that Jean was bored in the marriage and probably just left her to start a new life with another woman she changes her mind. Now she wants to see his dead corpse. When she sees the deformed body in the morgue she denies reality again. She tells the police that it was not him though the belongings the police found were obviously his. At the end she is back at the beach and sees a man in the distance who resembles Jean a bit. She runs towards him and the film finishes.