Tree and sea

Plus the director of Hilary and Jackie

Your husband's in the city, you're alone with your baby at home on an isolated island, and a stranger comes knocking, a sullen young woman (Marina de Van) with unseasonable heavy clothes and a backpack, wanting to know whether she can camp on your property. Trouble? You'd think so when the young woman eats dinner in your house and licks her plate like a mad dog, when she uses your toilet and -- deliberately? -- neglects to flush it, when her diary notebook of hanging bodies and looped-together ramblings looks like something out of The Shining.

So what does our heroine (Sasha Hails) do in François Ozon's erotic French thriller See the Sea (at the MFA January 22 through 30)? She invites the creepy young woman to sleep in her house and even to stay with her infant while she goes into town. Although she should know better, she can't resist courting this mysterious young female hobo, whose take-to-the-road existence reminds her so strongly of her one deep adventure in life as a pre-married backpacker. In fact, almost from the moment of the stranger's arrival, our heroine starts to turn wild -- i.e., abandoning her toddler on the beach for a quick go at oral service in a gay cruising forest.

But we know everyone's just biding time until something awful happens. It's clear from the first frames, from the hushed oceanic sounds and the long, genuinely unnerving silences, as wife and baby wait . . . and wait. Filmmaker Ozon has studied the early Roman Polanski of the Polish-made shorts and Knife in the Water, where, down by the waterside, sex and violence thirst to erupt onto the very mimimalist, dry, monosyllabic surface.

Sea the Sea is that kind of effective artsy thriller, though its cautionary tale of what happens to women in bathing suits who screw around is, if you think too much about it, not so different from the usual teen stuff of I Know What You Did Last Summer.

See the Sea has a 15-minute companion piece, "A Summer Dress," also by François Ozon and photographed by the same superb cinematographer, Yorick le Saux, on the same French vacation island, and even at some of the same locales: the beach, that randy forest. This one's a pantheistic, polymorphous, bisexual comedy of manners in which an uncomfortably gay man runs off from his lover to the ocean, loses his heterosexual virginity in the woods to a free-spirited young woman, and then, wearing her dress, returns to his man, now happily liberated to enjoy gay sex as the "female." It's somewhere between a gay porn film and a Shakespeare green comedy but, whatever, "A Summer Dress" is blithe fun.

A note: François Ozon has directed in writing that "A Summer Dress" should precede See the Sea. He's wrong: as critic Northrup Frye observed, tragedy is incomplete comedy. The sun rises from the darkness, Christ is resurrected, a raunchy satyr play follows three Greek tragedies. So it should be: the horror beach of See the Sea washed away by the life-positive sex romp of "A Summer Dress."

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It happens too often that people identify "melodrama," which is a genre like "Western" or "musical," with "melodramatic," by which they usually mean something wrongly overdone, overwrought, overemotional. But of course a melodrama done right is also "melodramatic." Acting is showy, emotions are over the top, soundtrack music reinforces these emotions, and the script tells you exactly what characters are thinking. Nothing is hidden; everything is exuberant and flashy, including editing and camerawork.

When I talked with Anand Tucker, the British filmmaker of Hilary and Jackie, at September's Toronto International Film Festival, I knew we'd get along if he agreed that his rousing movie bio (about the stormy relationship of cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who died of multiple sclerosis at age 42, and her sister Hilary) was an old-fashioned, tear-tugging "melodrama." If he balked at the unfashionable term, we'd be in trouble.

Tucker was delighted at my genre choice. "Of course it's a melodrama, nakedly, openly emotional, just like in the old days, a women's picture. There's nothing intellectual about it. These are simple scenes: illness, loss, death come to all of us. Talk about them! Everything came from the gut, and I cried often making the film.

"All cinema is manipulative. I love using the camera and music to heighten emotions and get the audience to feel what I'm feeling. Some people may think it's too much. But I hope the film isn't cheap, for we responded with our hearts."

Tucker says he's influenced by such Douglas Sirk melodramas as Written on the Wind and "the English visionary filmmaking" of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Although he's happy that Shine's popularity may have opened the portal for Hilary and Jackie's classical music, he says that the film he watched most in preparation was Raging Bull. The family stories, Tucker insists, are remarkably akin. "Two brothers who fight and yet love each other no matter what. Boxing is like the cello; De Niro's La Motta loses it all. His genius, like Jackie's, is also a curse."