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By the Sea, film review: The Pitts, in more ways than one

We get to see Angelina do her grocery shopping while Brad painstakingly trims his moustache

Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday 10 December 2015 17:10 GMT
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Love don’t live here anymore: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Pitt in ‘By the Sea’
Love don’t live here anymore: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Pitt in ‘By the Sea’

By the Sea, Angelina Jolie Pitt’s latest feature as director, is a strangely torpid and paradoxical affair. Jolie Pitt wrote and produced the film, and, for good measure, stars in it alongside her husband (and co-producer), Brad Pitt. To add to the sense of Chinese boxes about an already self-reflexive project, Jolie Pitt and Pitt are playing a married couple.

The setting is a remote and idyllic seaside town in France in the 1970s. Pitt plays Roland Bertrand, an American writer abroad with a hint of James Jones or William Styron about him. He types on a red Olivetti, which always has a glass of whisky beside it, but does most of his serious work in the local bar, where he has befriended the “patron’ (Niels Arestrup). Jolie Pitt plays Vanessa, a former dancer.

Roland and Vanessa are first seen driving through the countryside in an open-top sports car. They look the perfect couple in their own chic, 1970s Eurotrash way but we quickly discover that they are very unhappy indeed. His career has all but spluttered to a halt. She is a Sphinx-like figure, almost frozen with grief.

This is Brad and Angelina in European arthouse mode. That means the pacing is allowed to slow right down and the storytelling style is self-consciously enigmatic. The source of Vanessa’s grief is hinted at in elliptical montage sequences but only very belatedly explained. We don’t learn the name of the town. Nor is it all that clear why the couple have come there – although Roland seems to think he will find inspiration for his next book.

There is no embarrassment about using poetic symbolism, either. The moment she arrives in the small seaside town, Vanessa becomes obsessed with a lone fisherman who rows out to sea every day in a tiny boat. It’s his perseverance that seems to baffle and astound her, as she herself has lost the will to do anything other than survive from day to day. She stands on her balcony, looking at the waves. Pitt’s Roland spends his time holed up in the bar, listening to the owner tell stories about the loss of his beloved wife; meanwhile, Roland gets more and more drunk.

There are shots of the couple naked in the shower or making love in a marble bath that are far franker than anything found through the longest lenses of even the most shameless paparazzi photographers. There are also some mind-numbingly banal sequences in which we get to see her doing her grocery shopping or going for walks along the shore while Brad painstakingly trims his moustache.

Jolie Pitt shows a commendable sense of irony by making her character an unhappy voyeur. For once, she isn’t just the one being looked at – she spends much of the movie on her knees, doing the looking. Her afternoon hobby is peering through a peep hole in the wall at the attractive, young and newly married couple next door (Melvil Poupaud and Mélanie Laurent), who have much more sex and laughter in their lives than she and Brad can muster.

There is relatively little dialogue here and much of what we do hear (“Do you want another beer?” “Yes, can I buy you one?”) sounds as if it comes from an “English as a foreign language” instructional video.

Early on in the film, at least, the mood leans to the disquieting. The locations are idyllic and the sun is shining, and yet the tone of the storytelling is funereal. Roland and Vanessa, who have been married for 14 years, seem sick of one another’s company.

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François (Poupard) and Léa (Laurent) very conveniently seem to start making love at the very moment that Vanessa begins spying. Equally conveniently, they never notice that there is a gaping big hole in the wall just parallel with their bed.

They are an attractive and impulsive couple who are generous to their older neighbours, describing them as “both fine people going through a difficult time”. Some of their energy rubs off on Roland and Vanessa, who begin to rediscover their own lust for life. At the same time, there is something vampire-like in the way that the older husband and wife prey on the younger couple.

Part of the problem with By the Sea is that it is bold but not bold enough. It doesn’t have the courage of its own perversions. It risks falling in some dreary middle ground between Georges Bataille-like erotic fantasy and conventional romantic melodrama. The film is beautifully shot by Christian Berger, the cinematographer on Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Hidden. Actually filmed in Malta, it peddles an image of 1970s France that rekindles old memories of Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg.

Jolie Pitt is as striking a screen presence as ever. She is very elegantly dressed here, often in broad-brimmed hats. She is effective in portraying her character’s sense of grief and distance from the world. Pitt is a fine actor, too, and does a decent enough job in playing the hackneyed archetype of the hard-drinking, self-loathing American writer abroad. You can’t help but think that if Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (the last celebrity movie couple who used to make arthouse movies like this) were playing the same roles, there would at least have been a bit more oomph – some smashed crockery and much more, yelling for a start.

It doesn’t help that Jolie Pitt’s screenplay is so cryptic. There appear to be some strongly autobiographical references within it but they are very heavily veiled. The result is a movie that, at times, verges on the unfathomable – one likely to leave both Brad and Angelina fans, and devotees of 1970s art cinema, scratching their heads as they try to work out what precisely the film is about and just what it is that Angelina is trying to tell them.

Angelina Jolie Pitt, 122 mins Starring: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Melvil Poupaud, Niels Arestrup

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