Ghosts on the sand: François Ozon's haunted beaches

Abstract

This article examines the films of François Ozon and their repeated use of the beach as a place of abjection, death and haunting. It argues against the critical consensus that Ozon's films can be divided into camp provocations or serious chamber pieces, demonstrating that the beachscape works against binary oppositions, and acknowledging the vital role the beach plays in his filmography as a site that permits queer mourning, a subversive and transgressive practice that melds the serious and the playful. The beach and the cinema share a range of characteristics, troubling the borders between absence and presence, stillness and movement, life and death. Ozon's emphasis on the beach as indeterminate border, where the difference between the living and the dead becomes imperceptible, thus offers a self-reflexive investigation of the transgressive potential of cinema itself.

Notes

^1. In the French DVD commentary with François Ozon and Pierre Barillet, the author of the boulevard play that the film is loosely based upon, Barillet jokingly remarks that ‘Luchini must have been delighted to see himself represented like this as adolescent’, to which Ozon replies, ‘but Fabrice was charming when he was younger, didn't you see him in Eric Rohmer's films?’

^2. The decision to film Romain in a Breton coastal resort, rather than the more Ozonian Landes region, alludes to the site of Eric Rohmer's Conte d'été, in which Poupard played Gaspard, a 20-something man on holiday who cannot choose between three potential lovers. For more on Ozon's dense intertextual referencing of Rohmer and their shared interest in depicting beaches, see Handyside (2012b, 53–67).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona Handyside

Fiona Handyside is Senior Lecturer in European Film Studies at University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Eric Rohmer: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press, 2013) and is currently completing a monograph titled Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Cinema to be published by Peter Lang.