MartinHafer MAJOR SPOILER ALERT--Don't Read This if You Haven't Seen the Film! This little picture is slightly less than one hour long, but due to its being a rather disgusting little picture, it seemed longer--I simply didn't enjoy it at all and found it tough going. It's the story of a screwy young lady and her baby at the beach. They meet a very strange female drifter and they become friends, of sorts. Then, rather out of the blue, the film has a very, very bloody and unsettling ending--complete with very explicit nudity and violence.The very end of the story I found to be very confusing, as it was hard to figure out exactly WHO murdered WHO (I am sorry for the spoiler, but this is a truly confusing film). Apparently I got it wrong who perpetrated the attack when I first reviewed the film, as an alert IMDb reader noted. And while I usually don't make these sort of errors, I tried re-watching the film just to see how I could have made this mistake. And, even the second time, I could see how this occurred, as the body and perpetrator were only VERY briefly seen at the end. This ambiguity may have been intentional--I just don't know. Another reason I think I didn't exactly understand who did what is that what DID occur didn't make much sense to me at all--it seemed like a gratuitous and senseless ending and the motivation for this act was unclear.

The_Void My main reason for seeking out this film was due to the fact that it's directed by one of the great filmmakers of today, Francois Ozon. You can always count on Ozon to deliver a well observed tale of the unexpected, and even though he lacked experience at the time this film was made, it's still a great way to spend 52 minutes of your life. From Ozon's later movies, the one I would say this one most closely resembles is the seductive thriller Swimming Pool, as Ozon captures the meeting of two very different women and the resulting absurdity that stems from that meeting. See the Sea is a lot grittier than Swimming Pool, however, and if his objective with this film was to make an impact; he definitely succeeded in doing just that. The film focuses on Sasha, a young woman living a peaceful life with her baby daughter in a beach house. Her life is disrupted one day when another woman by the name of Tatiana asks if she may camp out on Sasha's land. Sasha agrees, and the film follows the relationship between the two over the course of a few days.This film is very short, running at just 52 minutes; but Ozon makes great use of his time, and overall I've got to say that I'd have been happy for him to drag the story out more. The pace of the film is very relaxed, but it's always obvious that it's leading to a sinister conclusion. Ozon builds the tension between the characters well, and by constantly hinting that there's more to the eerie stranger that meets the eye, the director skilfully entices his audience into the central situation. The build-up to the final resolution is never terribly shocking (toothbrush scene aside), but it's always foreboding and this bodes excellently with the shock climax. The style of the film is very down and dirty, and the film doesn't feature the picturesque settings and cinematography of the later Swimming Pool. The way that the director finally shows his hand is absolutely superb, however, as the character that has been referred to but never seen until the end comes home to survey the damage to his family home. Overall, See the Sea is a distressing and damaging film that leaves the viewer with something to think about, and while the director has done better; this early film is well worth seeing.

przgzr Ever since I've started writing comments on IMDb I've been writing about European movies more than about American, and I've suggested readers to watch most of them. I gave good marks to French movies, though many others (mostly American) movie-lovers found them pretentious, false artistic or boring. But now here's the movie that expresses everything bad people have ever thought about French movies. Too short for a serious standard movie, too long for its weak story. Too much nudity for prudes, too little to be a soft-porn. Too many unimportant scenes, too little developing of characters. If Americans often make cover versions of French movies, this one shamelessly steels from US movies and still succeeds to make it boring, because we can expect in advance every important event and the revealing of secrets doesn't surprise us very much. Finally, the "shocking" end of the movie is in fact the only logical one.What's good in the movie? Photography maybe, but it is so common in French movies that it's not necessary to emphasize it (no better, no worse than average French photo). The acting is also far below French standards. Paul as character might have also been omitted from the movie, he might have been left just as a person somewhere far away: it would have been intriguing for us to think if he existed at all. But it would be too, too much for writers to understand that.

glabrezu The visual sequence of this film is excellent as for any other film by Ozon. I don't know where he gets the camera people, but they all are top-notch.The scenes that might seem illogical at the beginning keep providing more substance to the characters, and the final (I liked it a lot that it wasn't in the list of the possible outcomes that I had in mind) everything suddenly snaps into places.The dilemma with this film is that watching it early in the day will probably keep you uneasy for the rest of it, and watching it late in the night might easily make your sleep less sound. The choice is up to you.Yeah, and Ozon is brilliant in shooting women with cigarettes.9/10