Critics reviews

In a development that belies all received wisdom about actresses and aging, Rampling's greatest parts wouldn't come until after she turned 50. In Under the Sand (2000), her career-revitalizing collaboration with François Ozon, she gives an acute performance of grief, playing Marie Drillon, a Paris-based English-lit prof who refuses to acknowledge her husband's disappearance.

Creating a character at once sad, disturbing, and distant, Rampling delivers a performance of hidden depths perfectly in sync with the tone of the film.

Rampling, like Susan Sarandon, is far more interesting, accomplished, and attractive in middle age than she was in her 20s, and this film takes full advantage of this fact. One of the ways it does this is by displacing the issue of what happened to Jean and why — a displacement that feels very real, given all of the mysteries in life that remain unsolved — and instead concentrating on the psychological ramifications of the disappearance for Marie, which ultimately seem more interesting.

By stepping back a bit, Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano étude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.

It’s no slight to Ozon’s direction to say that the virtue of the film is its minimalism—the fact that it can be reduced to the relationship between camera and actress.