Writer: Angelina Jolie Pitt
Director: Angelina Jolie Pitt
Roland (Pitt) and his wife Vanessa (Jolie Pitt) pitch up in a secluded French coastal town where Roland hopes to get the creative juices flowing for his next novel. It's far from plain sailing though as he struggles with the ghosts of his previous literary failures and his wife struggles with the ghosts of something terrible in the recent past. As if that wasn't enough, the arrival of another couple (played by Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) threatens to shake their world even more...
From the very first second of By The Sea it's clear that Angelina Jolie Pitt set out to make her version of a Euro arthouse flick and to be fair it has the beautiful scenery, the languid pace, the tortured characters, the long silences and the portentous dialogue. However, whereas the best examples of the genre take all of these elements and spin them into something magical, this movie only serves to highlight what happens when the hoped-for alchemy produces something far from gold.
For starters the dialogue, although delivered with admirable conviction by an undoubtedly talented set of performers, borders on parody. I know that art films are littered with lines that no person would actually say but there are entire scenes full of them here which a) jolted me out of the piece and b) had me (and others in the cinema) stifling giggles on a few occasions.
Secondly, Roland and Vanessa aren't that likeable a pairing, which wouldn't be a problem if their trials and tribulations were enough to sweep the audience along. Unfortunately that isn't the case. Roland gets drunk a lot, which makes him babble on (and on, and on, and on) about his crumbling marriage and inability to write. Vanessa spends a lot of time either in bed or on a sun lounger and cries a lot. Oh, she goes food shopping as well. They meet up in their hotel room of an evening and say cryptic things to each other. Next day Roland's back in the bar and Vanessa's wondering if they need more groceries. Contain your excitement, folks.
Actually, there is one genuinely interesting character - Michel, the "patron" of the local bar. Played by Niels Arestrup, he's a delight to watch even if he's relegated to dispensing advice to the increasingly pissed-up Roland. It's good to see Pitt and Arestrup talk in French rather than have them revert to English but even then things don't work out as they should because their verbal back-and-forth seems to have been stripped from a Linguaphone Conversational Arthouse Movie tape - "I'd like a gin, please", "How long have you been married?", "How do I get to the railway station?". Actually that last one isn't in the movie but I was ready for it, along with "Qu'est-ce que vous faites le week-end?".
As for Laurent and Poupaid, their newlywed couple is there to provide the obvious sparks, to allow Pitt and Jolie Pitt's characters to indulge in some odd, voyeuristic behaviour and to suggest potential infidelity on all sides. Some of the symbolism here should really have been accompanied with a klaxon, especially the point at which a card game for two played by Laurent and Jolie Pitt switches to a card game for three when Pitt joins the proceedings. You see, the first game can't be played by three, but the second game can. Hmmm, could that be suggesting something else other than a card game? Let me think...
I was at least expecting this would rally at the end as the drama reached its peak and something finally had to give but I should have been prepared for yet another disappointment. The ultimate revelation about Jolie Pitt's character, which should have been the explosion of everything the story had built up to, was sadly lacking in drama and the film fizzled out from that point, leaving me almost none the wiser than the point at which I'd joined things two hours earlier. Roland's Citroën was very nice though.
I applaud Angelina Jolie Pitt's decision to write and direct something so unrelentingly uncommercial so it gives me absolutely no pleasure to report that this is bloody awful, pretentious nonsense with a plot that is obstinate in its will to go nowhere and two tedious, navel-gazing main characters you'd cross the street to avoid. Even the artistically-justified nudity and sex is dull. If you're going to see this just to get a look at Angelina's boobs then you deserve everything you get.
By The Sea could have been a memorable voyage into enticingly deep and dangerous waters. As it is, it never gets out of the shallows and you might very well have had enough of wading around them before its 122 minutes is up.
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