François Ozon's Regarde la mer (1997)

Regarde la mer, like La Robe d'été, is set on l'Île-d'Yeu, an island in Vendée only reached by boat.* Essentially this medium length (52 minute) film with only the two central characters have speaking parts (with the exception of a few unheard calls from the husband at the end): Sasha (Sasha Hails) and Tatiana (Marina De Van). Sasha's husband is away for a short time, leaving his wife in their holiday home to look after their baby child. Soon, a female drifter – who in some ways could be said to resemble a non-dangerous version of Mona in Varda's Sans toit ni loi – arrives and Sasha's world is overturned.

Tatiana has a tent and wants to pitch it near Sasha's home, although she's hardly polite when Sasha not only agrees, but encourages Tatiana, inviting her to a meal (and at the end of which Tatiana licks her plate clean like a dog), welcoming her outside the next morning to breakfast, in which Tatiana apparently rather begrudgingly merely has a coffee, no gratitude expressed. In fact, the weirder Tatiana gets and the more objectionable she becomes the more Sasha seems to become endeared to her.

And Sasha's excitement, even transformation it might be said, deepens as the whole odd business continues: on seeing Tatiana retire to her tent, Sasha watches it as she masturbates on the edge of a chair back. The next day on the beach, Sasha asks what Tatiana is looking at, to which comes the reply 'men fucking in the wood'. As if under some strange kind of spell Sasha ventures into the wood – an obvious gay cruising area – and imitates the men by standing against a tree as if in wait. A man comes along and begins caressing her breasts, although she directs his attention to her bikini bottom and he begins licking. It's impossible to tell if this is fantasy or supposed to represent reality in the film, but then some of Ozon's films work like this.

Sasha's husband phones her to let her know that he's returning the following morning and Sasha says Tatiana can spend the night in her home. While Sasha and her child are asleep Tatiana – who's revealed that she once had an abortion – watches the sleeping couple with tear running down her face and strips naked. When Sasha's husband returns he unzips the tent to find his dead wife naked and bound up, her vulva stiched up. The last shots we see are of Tatiana on the boat to the mainland, the baby in her arms.

^* Vendée's other isand is Noirmoutier, which can be reached by road, and of course is associated with Agnès Varda, who had a home there with her husband Jacques Demy.