When she wakes, Jean is missing — presumably drowned, though his body is not found.
The rest of the film follows Marie as she deals with the reality of her husband's death. It is a tour de force on Rampling's part: She is in virtually every frame of the movie, and she is both engaging and totally credible. Director Francois Ozon and his co-scenarists made an excellent decision in having the husband's body remain missing: In so doing, they turn the audience members into unwitting co-conspirators with Marie's own protracted stage of denial. We, too, suspect that the husband might still be alive — so when Marie's well-meaning friends cluck earnestly over her behaving as if his death hadn't happened, we instinctively take her side. It's one of the cleverest acts I've ever seen to win an audience's complicity.
Marie is a professor of English literature at a French university, and we see her teaching, interacting with students and colleagues, being hit on by men, and then going home to have conversations with her dead husband.
In these scenes, Bruno Cremer very effectively suggests a combination of how Jean really was and how Marie remembers and imagines him; the line between fantasy and reality is thus convincingly blurred — as it can often be in a deep grieving process.
In one of the film's most remarkable scenes, Marie is confronted by her mother-in-law, who claims that Jean confided in her that he was unhappy in the marriage and wanted to escape. Is she telling the truth? Is she lying, and trying to hurt Marie because she had hated Marie from the beginning? Or is she lying, but only in an attempt to keep alive the hope that her son has not actually died but has only run away? We don't know, and neither does Marie: Again, we share the main character's ignorance — when it comes to death, mystery unites us all.
Robert Kennedy loved the following passage from Aeschylus: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Francois Ozon's movie explores this territory — experiences known, feared, and endured eventually by all of us — with taste, dignity, and depth.
(This article reprinted with permission of National Review Online.)
