The possibilities of a beach: queerness and Francois Ozon's beaches

Abstract

François Ozon's predilection for the beach has been noted by many critics, to the extent that is now read as an auteurist signature. Using the work of Judith Halberstam and Lee Edelman, this essay argues that the recurrent use of the beachscape in Ozon's films offers a way of envisaging a queer cinema which is not predicated on individual bodies performing discrete acts, but which provides a framework for constantly reconfiguring what queer forms and practices might be. His beaches undo reproductive futurism as they place time into a loop of repetition and haunting. These spectral figures often take the form of ghostly children, though these act not as sentimental ciphers of the future but as an affective pull issuing from another time (a simultaneous doubled past and future) outside of the remit of normative desires. As such, Ozon's films offer a radical vision in which alternative kinship structures are suggested by the friable and shifting nature of the sands which feature in his films.