I like Ozon's films, but they always leave me in two minds, and See The Sea is no exception. While it plays out quite a straightforward sequence of events - albeit a sequence characterised by perversity and menace - it's riddled with a patchwork of interrelated motifs (the sea/water as feminine symbol; motherhood; female desire; sex; freudian stages) and is highly symbolically charged. It's visually very striking, too - the bright colours and glaring lighting are almost kitsch - and the manner in which the film cuts and jumps from scene to scene is suitably disorienting. But in many ways it's a very opaque film, just as its characters are opaque; while motivations and emotional makeups are sometimes alluded to, the characters ultimately seem to be interacting in ways which are more or less entirely affectless. Maybe the best way of thinking of it is as some kind of grim fairy tale (a la Criminal Lovers).
There was an Ozon short on the dvd called Summer Dress, in which a (probably) gay boy, on holiday with his boyfriend, seems to grow more comfortable with his orientation after a sexual encounter with a girl on a beach...it's rather sweet, and seems to encapsulate something of an Ozon obsession (the 'breaking-in' of the male character in Criminal Lovers by the troll/father figure functioned in the same way, except that the sexual orientations were reversed in that film).
