I happened to be on the site at the time of the shooting. So, I looked forward to seeing the produced work. Enormous was my disappointment, up to revulsion, and nevertheless that film that I still dislike keeps haunting me. The French press in its large majority covered with praise - speaking even about poetry - what for me stays as a nauseating demonstration by the absurd, the grotesque and the vulgar. All the professional actors contributing to the ludicrous by a voluntarily excessive overplay, up to the point of raising extreme annoyance, such as throughout the galloping hysteria of the character played by Juliette Binoche. At the heart of the exceptional beauty of Côte d'Opale - however watered down by the cinematography -, all characters are grotesque to the excess: the painting of a degenerate humanity, from the fishermen's poor family of mussels pickers poured into cannibalism, up to the microcosm of a bourgeois family enriched by the textile industry. ... Every character but one, about whom for quite some time one can not help wandering whether she is a girl disguised as boy or whether he is a boy disguised as girl. A sensitive character in such ambiguity, till nowadays a pariah through ages... Maybe that was the message intended by the director, how could we know?
