Under the Sand

In the film the traumatic event occurs when Jean disappears during his swim at the beach. I think it was presented this way in order for it not to be clear. Anything could have happened. Jean could have drowned. He could have gone too far out and been carried away by the current, only to be rescued and brought to another place. Another option is what his mother told Marie, that he got bored, faked his own death, and ran. If this event wasn’t so ambiguous Marie’s position concerning him wouldn’t have been so interesting.

After this event, Marie doesn’t process what happened. She’s in denial that anything happened to him. She told her close friends and family what happened to Jean, but no one else. When she talks to people about Jean, she makes vague references to him traveling a lot for work. Whenever her friend Amanda tries to ask her about how she’d doing and handling everything, Marie acts as though she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. During one of her classes, Marie notices that one of her students helped in the search for Jean and loses her concentration. When she encounters him later, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he is talking about and that she has never been to beach. The biggest advancement she makes towards his disappearance is when she looks through his desk at home. She goes through everything and finds out that he was on depression medications. She begins to worry that he may have killed himself and needs reassurance from Amanda and his mother that he didn’t.

Marie refuses to accept that Jean’s body is in the morgue because she can’t properly identify it. The medical examiner said that the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, making the body unrecognizable. Even though the police recovered a watch and swim trunks that fit the description Marie can deny that they are his. They could belong to any person and the unrecognizable body could be anyone. Marie has had delusions that Jean is at home with her ever since she returned from the summer house. The body and personal items that they’ve shown her aren’t enough to make her believe differently.

At the end of the film I thought that Marie was going to kill herself in the same manner as Virginia Woolf. She had expressed earlier in the film that she thought it was a beautiful and poetic way to die.