Oh Dear , Film Review : By the Sea
By the Sea
If only By the Sea were hilariously bad, I could recommend it for star power alone. But this is a film stuck in the doldrums, with Angelina Jolie Pitt’s albatross of pretension hanging round its neck.
Kate Muir
Published , December 11 2015
If only By the Sea were hilariously bad, I could recommend it for star
power alone. But this is a film stuck in the doldrums, with Angelina Jolie
Pitt’s albatross of pretension hanging round its neck.
Jolie writes, directs, produces and stars opposite her husband, Brad Pitt, in a dissection of a troubled marriage on the Côte d’Azur — that cinematic destination where so many relationships have flown off the cliff. The early Seventies mood is set with a soundtrack of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s Jane B. Jolie and Pitt drive — with the warm wind in their hair — down corkscrew roads in a silver sports car as the turquoise sea glitters below and cliché beckons.
“I smell fish” is Jolie’s opening line as she arrives in a French seaside village, but what this film actually reeks of is self-indulgence, an assumption that the pulchritude and glamour of the Brangelina dream team can hold up a script almost devoid of plot, characterisation or intelligent dialogue.
Yet our Hollywood auteur does not fear to tread in the Mediterranean footsteps of Antonioni’s The Adventure, or perhaps Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, or even Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief — but her retread is neither postmodern nor ironic. It is deadly serious.
Jolie and Pitt play Vanessa and Roland, a New York couple on holiday in a luxury hotel in the south of France (the scenes are in fact shot in Gozo in Malta). Roland is a famous novelist suffering writer’s block, which he tries to unblock at the local bar all day, and Vanessa is a superannuated dancer who now does “nothing”.
Actually, that’s not true: Vanessa does a lot of wafting about, posing and sighing attractively in diaphanous black chiffon loungewear and wearing fetching wide-brimmed sun hats as she takes long walks just a bit too close to the edge of the cliffs. “Jump, Vanessa! Jump!” you want to cry, hoping she will end our enervating experience, but this journey just goes on and on.
Vanessa is popping what looks like Valium, and grieving some loss, which Roland knows all about but we in the audience must await to divine from their flat conversation. “I don’t sleep peacefully. You know that,” says Vanessa. “You resist happiness,” says Roland. Would a wordsmith not be more zippy or even melodramatic in his repartee? But it appears that Roland is no F Scott Fitzgerald and Vanessa is no Zelda, despite the similar cocktails-on-the-Côte-d’Azur literary setting.
Rolnessa (Brangelina) have been together for 15 years and are childless, on “the second stage of marriage”, which results in Vanessa rejecting Roland’s clumsy advances in the shower and in bed, somewhat understandable when he staggers in drunk, throws up, then kisses her. The mouthwash scene had giggles erupting in the cinema.
Hope arrives at the hotel in the form of young honeymooners Lea and François, played by Mélanie Laurent in a baby-doll dress and Melvil Poupaud strumming a guitar. The older couple are fascinated by the younger one, particularly when Vanessa discovers a large-bore spyhole into their adjoining bedroom, allowing the oldsters and the camera to relish the constant rumpy-pumpy. For a moment, the voyeurism is almost amusing, as Vanessa and Roland settle down on the floor by the peephole with a glass of wine and food, enjoying a TV dinner.
The titillation brings a smidgen of life into the dreary Rolnessa relationship, as the two couples flirt with each other and take a sunset trip on a yacht. But this is thin gruel when you remember Mr & Mrs Smith, the action-comedy that brought Jolie and Pitt together in 2005 and had them play married assassins who sexily try to shoot the hell out of each other.
Times have changed for Jolie and Pitt since then. They have six children, three of whom are adopted, and Jolie bravely underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013 because she carries genetic markers for cancer. The knowledge of all this undermines making critical rather than psychological sense of the film, particularly the significance of its lingering bath and bedroom scenes. Perhaps this is about catharsis for Jolie, but certainly not for the viewer.
Jolie is not untalented behind the camera — her two previous directorial efforts, Unbroken and In the Land of Blood and Honey, are worthy and serious, and she is one of the few women directors who can get solid financial backing in Hollywood. But this dalliance with faux-European arthouse cinema is a glaring error. As Jolie says in the film’s production notes: “By the Sea is not intended to be a commercial film . . . we hope it will be enjoyed by people seeking a more challenging cinema experience.” Touché.
Angelina Jolie Pitt, 15, 122min
There was less positive news for Jolie’s By the Sea,
the Hollywood A-lister’s third feature as director. The relationship
drama, in which the Oscar-winner stars with her husband Pitt as a
married couple struggling to save their romance with a visit to a French
resort in the 1970s, scored just $95,440 from 10 cinemas on limited
release. The film’s location average of $9,544 is considered weak and
the drama looks likely to struggle when it opens in an additional 90
cinemas next weekend – after picking up withering reviews.
Jolie writes, directs, produces and stars opposite her husband, Brad Pitt, in a dissection of a troubled marriage on the Côte d’Azur — that cinematic destination where so many relationships have flown off the cliff. The early Seventies mood is set with a soundtrack of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s Jane B. Jolie and Pitt drive — with the warm wind in their hair — down corkscrew roads in a silver sports car as the turquoise sea glitters below and cliché beckons.
“I smell fish” is Jolie’s opening line as she arrives in a French seaside village, but what this film actually reeks of is self-indulgence, an assumption that the pulchritude and glamour of the Brangelina dream team can hold up a script almost devoid of plot, characterisation or intelligent dialogue.
Yet our Hollywood auteur does not fear to tread in the Mediterranean footsteps of Antonioni’s The Adventure, or perhaps Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, or even Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief — but her retread is neither postmodern nor ironic. It is deadly serious.
Jolie and Pitt play Vanessa and Roland, a New York couple on holiday in a luxury hotel in the south of France (the scenes are in fact shot in Gozo in Malta). Roland is a famous novelist suffering writer’s block, which he tries to unblock at the local bar all day, and Vanessa is a superannuated dancer who now does “nothing”.
Actually, that’s not true: Vanessa does a lot of wafting about, posing and sighing attractively in diaphanous black chiffon loungewear and wearing fetching wide-brimmed sun hats as she takes long walks just a bit too close to the edge of the cliffs. “Jump, Vanessa! Jump!” you want to cry, hoping she will end our enervating experience, but this journey just goes on and on.
Vanessa is popping what looks like Valium, and grieving some loss, which Roland knows all about but we in the audience must await to divine from their flat conversation. “I don’t sleep peacefully. You know that,” says Vanessa. “You resist happiness,” says Roland. Would a wordsmith not be more zippy or even melodramatic in his repartee? But it appears that Roland is no F Scott Fitzgerald and Vanessa is no Zelda, despite the similar cocktails-on-the-Côte-d’Azur literary setting.
Rolnessa (Brangelina) have been together for 15 years and are childless, on “the second stage of marriage”, which results in Vanessa rejecting Roland’s clumsy advances in the shower and in bed, somewhat understandable when he staggers in drunk, throws up, then kisses her. The mouthwash scene had giggles erupting in the cinema.
Hope arrives at the hotel in the form of young honeymooners Lea and François, played by Mélanie Laurent in a baby-doll dress and Melvil Poupaud strumming a guitar. The older couple are fascinated by the younger one, particularly when Vanessa discovers a large-bore spyhole into their adjoining bedroom, allowing the oldsters and the camera to relish the constant rumpy-pumpy. For a moment, the voyeurism is almost amusing, as Vanessa and Roland settle down on the floor by the peephole with a glass of wine and food, enjoying a TV dinner.
The titillation brings a smidgen of life into the dreary Rolnessa relationship, as the two couples flirt with each other and take a sunset trip on a yacht. But this is thin gruel when you remember Mr & Mrs Smith, the action-comedy that brought Jolie and Pitt together in 2005 and had them play married assassins who sexily try to shoot the hell out of each other.
Times have changed for Jolie and Pitt since then. They have six children, three of whom are adopted, and Jolie bravely underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013 because she carries genetic markers for cancer. The knowledge of all this undermines making critical rather than psychological sense of the film, particularly the significance of its lingering bath and bedroom scenes. Perhaps this is about catharsis for Jolie, but certainly not for the viewer.
Jolie is not untalented behind the camera — her two previous directorial efforts, Unbroken and In the Land of Blood and Honey, are worthy and serious, and she is one of the few women directors who can get solid financial backing in Hollywood. But this dalliance with faux-European arthouse cinema is a glaring error. As Jolie says in the film’s production notes: “By the Sea is not intended to be a commercial film . . . we hope it will be enjoyed by people seeking a more challenging cinema experience.” Touché.
Angelina Jolie Pitt, 15, 122min
Trailer
There was less positive news for Jolie’s By the Sea,
the Hollywood A-lister’s third feature as director. The relationship
drama, in which the Oscar-winner stars with her husband Pitt as a
married couple struggling to save their romance with a visit to a French
resort in the 1970s, scored just $95,440 from 10 cinemas on limited
release. The film’s location average of $9,544 is considered weak and
the drama looks likely to struggle when it opens in an additional 90
cinemas next weekend – after picking up withering reviews.
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