Regarde la mer (1997) - film review

One summer, Sasha, a young English woman, settles into a remote holiday cottage near the coast.   With her husband away on business, her only companion is her baby daughter.  One day, a wild-looking backpacker, Tatiana, appears on her doorstep and asks if she can camp in the garden.  Sasha agrees, hesitantly, but she soon begins to take a strange fascination for her unexpected guest. Could the attraction prove to be fatal...?

Regarde la mer is one of those rare films which provides a genuinely unsettling viewing experience and will have you wondering why for hours afterwards.  Its impact lies not in its subject, but in the subtle way in which it plays with and skilfully undercuts our expectations, threading some very nasty undercurrents into a situation which, on the surface at least, seems so quaintly banal.  It is an exploration of the human psyche which is both darkly sinister and chillingly accurate, all the more effective by virtue of its understated, rigorously naturalistic approach. 

Remarkably, this is not the work of an established world-renowned cineaste but a thirty-year-old novice filmmaker who had a mere dozen or so short films under his directorial belt.  With its sombre, introspective tone and dark subject matter, the film presages many of Ozon’s subsequent full-length films – notably Les Amants criminels (1999) and Sous le sable (2000).  Ozon’s well-known fascination for psychological derangement, murderous intrigue and sexual perversion is readily apparent in Regarde la mer, which is an ingenious re-interpretation of the great Ingmar Bergman film Persona (1966). 

As in Persona, Regarde la mer is about the relationship between two women who are polar opposites in character, and how they experience a gradual personality-swap as they get to know one another.  Sasha and Tatiana each recognise in the other an aspect of femininity which is missing in herself and which each is desperate to attain.  For the child-burdened housewife Sasha, Tatiana represents absolute freedom, the freedom to go anywhere, the freedom to satisfy wild sensual desires and live like a wild creature.  Tatiana sees in Sasha the loving mother she has secretly yearned to be, fulfilled through the maternal bond with the child born of her own flesh.   At a darker, more metaphysical level, Sasha’s lives but craves death, whilst Tatiana is a dead soul who yearns for life.   The women’s chance meeting allows both of them the opportunity to realise what they most desire – but with terrible consequences.  A fascinating but very disturbing film.

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