By The Sea

Synopsis: Americans, Vanessa (Angelina Jolie Pitt), a former dancer, and her husband, Roland (Brad Pitt), a writer, arrive in a coastal village in France during the mid-1970s so that he can reconnect with his muse and they can get their marriage back on track.

Angelina Jolie Pitt’s film has been comprehensively dismissed in her homeland but on the evidence one wonders why the knives have been unsheathed. What did they want? More hi-jinx à la Mr and Mrs Smith, a film which is only memorable for having brought the glam couple together.  Rather, the most relevant cinematic reference point for this film is Roberto Rossellini ‘s 1953 classic, Journey In Italy, which is about an estranged couple on a holiday in Italy. Which is, more or less, what By The Sea is about.

It starts with the fashionable couple arriving in a hamlet in the South of France (the film was shot in Malta which explains why the locale looks so unFrench) in their silver Citroën Déesse.  They are greeted by an affable bar owner (Neils Arestrup) and set themselves up in a vintage chic hotel in a room overlooking La Mediterranée.

This is all very picturesque, albeit slightly worryingly so, as Jolie Pitt the director spends a lot of time framing Jolie Pitt the actress in languorous poses as if she were on a shoot for Vogue. She even has herself reading Vogue!  The trouble is that the actress/director is so emaciated that we cannot take our eyes off her near-anorexic thinness (even if this is perhaps justified within the narrative) which is exaggerated by the black eyeliner and fake lashes that she never removes, even in bed or the shower.

That this is nowhere near as attractive as Jolie Pitt, apparently in some kind of narcissistic delusion, seems to  believe it to be, is one problem.  That the film moves at such a languid pace, another, as Jolie Pitt, who also wrote the script, very slowly allows the pieces of the story to emerge, those pieces being largely a young honeymooning couple (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) in the room next door with whom the emotionally estranged Vanessa identifies as a kind of younger version of her and her husband.  In the latter role one can understand the casting of Pitt, firstly because he could be had at (if you’ll excuse the pun) mate’s rates and secondly because the two leads have to perform a love-making scene together.  But frankly Pitt just doesn’t come across as a writer. In fact one can’t imagine him ever having read a book in his life. A screenwriter, maybe, so this is perhaps another of Jolie Pitt’s self-indulgences, trying to give her film a Hemingwayesque tone it didn't need (Roland is supposed to be a lush but as the film progresses this pretty much gets forgotten about).

All these criticisms no doubt feed into the negative response the film has received.  But let’s be fair. Jolie Pitt performs the roles of writer, director and star (she and her husband were also producers).  Her short-storyish script is satisfying both as a thoughtful portrait of a marriage in extremis and as a character-driven drama, with a well-articulated structure that, once the film warms up, draws us in (there are a few almost-subliminal inserts that do not however). The performances are strong (Pitt may be no scribbler but, presumably drawing on life experience, he does a good devoted husband) and Christian Berger’s photography packages the story nicely.  From this perspective, By The Sea is an ambitious project that Jolie Pitt has brought off, if not flawlessly, then with grace and substance.

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