By the Sea

There is noth­ing bet­ter than see­ing a movie which forces you to ques­tion the essen­tial role of the film crit­ic. The clas­sic mode of this schol­ar­ly pur­suit is to string togeth­er bina­ry deduc­tions of how cer­tain ele­ments ascribe to a per­son­al barom­e­ter of good or bad. If a bond of trust has been forged between crit­ic and read­er, then that’s a mode which can work like gangbusters.

But what else could we search for in a movie? And that word ​“search” is vital, as it infers that we shouldn’t just be clin­i­cal­ly inspect­ing the glis­ten­ing façade and rack­ing up the barbs/​plaudits as applic­a­ble. By and large, film crit­ics aren’t psy­chol­o­gists, but some­times we need to pre­tend to be. We’re quacks, oper­at­ing with­out port­fo­lio, but (often) with noble intent. There are gen­er­ous odds that our patients will not take our words with too much heed and, say, high­tail it to the near­est sus­pen­sion bridge for a date with des­tiny (side note: can movies com­mit sui­cide?). But what we write should demon­strate a cur­so­ry grap­pling with a movie’s motives as well as what we see, hear and feel.

On those terms, Angeli­na Jolie-Pitt’s By the Sea is a fas­ci­nat­ing work. It’s more a dolor­ous guess­ing game than a movie. As writer and direc­tor, she teas­es the view­er with the ques­tion: why am I here doing this? What’s in it for me? Unques­tion­ably, this is an exam­ple of an artist bar­ing her soul, reveal­ing her secrets, dis­charg­ing her bot­tled-up despair, and decon­struct­ing her image as high Tin­sel­town royalty.

But is she doing so in a bid for sym­pa­thy or as an act of pet­ty nar­cis­sism? It’s sad that so many have dis­missed the film as a van­i­ty project, some­thing that Jolie-Pitt need­ed to get out of her sys­tem rather than a tan­ta­lis­ing enter­tain­ment for the mass­es. But yes, you do get that she has made this film as a way to extri­cate her­self from cer­tain anx­i­eties about being a mid­dle-aged women locked with­in a patri­ar­chal system.

The film’s hard fem­i­nist cre­den­tials are even sewn in to its poster, as Jolie-Pitt has decid­ed to adopt the sur­name of her hus­band, while Pitt retains his own name. This dis­par­i­ty in gen­der expec­ta­tions is mir­rored in the film’s plot, a ​’70s-set psy­chodra­ma in which a pair of embit­tered but unfail­ing­ly pret­ty New York­ers take a break in a small French costal bolt­hole in order for him (Pitt’s Roland) to write a nov­el, and for her (Jolie-Pitt’s Nes­sa) to splay her­self on a sun-lounger, read bad books and wait for him to come home each day.

The very first action to occur in the film is Roland, while nav­i­gat­ing his soft-top Cit­roen along per­ilous moun­tain­side pass­es, attempt­ing to light a cig­a­rette. Yet, there’s no spark left for him to do so. The pair pull-up at a seafront bistro, run by Niels Arestrup’s affa­ble Michel. They down some drinks, then set up camp in a lux­u­ry hotel. With­out ever being too blunt about the fact, it’s clear there’s some­thing off bal­ance in this rela­tion­ship. There’s no phys­i­cal­i­ty or sen­su­al­i­ty between the pair, and nei­ther seem par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py to have arrived at this gor­geous, sun-soaked arcadia.

Jolie-Pitt’s oppres­sive focus on the hot-cold dynam­ics of a putre­fy­ing mar­riage between two beau­ti­ful, mid­dle-aged artists has drawn com­par­isons to the films of Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni. And this con­trast attains fur­ther cre­dence in its set­ting, which light­ly resem­bles the ear­ly seg­ments of Antonioni’s mod­ernist clas­sic, L’Avventura. But there’s an anthro­po­log­i­cal intent to Antonioni’s films, a sug­ges­tion that he’s mak­ing state­ments about peo­ple for whom he feels lit­tle affin­i­ty. This is naked­ly per­son­al film­mak­ing, more in line with movies by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard or Rain­er Wern­er Fassbinder.

Shades of Roman Polan­s­ki crop up as well, not least in Nessa’s phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal resem­blance to Cather­ine Deneuve’s Car­ol from Repul­sion, pom-pom bangs and all. With the aid of Michael Haneke’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, Chris­t­ian Berg­er, Jolie-Pitt makes exem­plary use of the film’s set­ting, a pic­ture-post­card cove which looks out to a sea of infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ty, but which is, in this instance, made con­strict­ing and claus­tro­pho­bic by Nessa’s state of incu­ri­ous apa­thy. Both she and Roland self-med­icate when­ev­er pos­si­ble, and the film offers a sting­ing indict­ment of the rit­u­al of men going out work­ing and women stay­ing in homemaking.

The arbi­trary fluc­tu­a­tions in Roland and Nessa’s rap­port mir­ror a rugged real­i­ty rather than any inflex­i­ble dra­mat­ic con­struct or some over-reach­ing metaphor. So yes, the plot is more a ran­dom col­lec­tion of details than a sim­ple daisy-chain of events. The issue which is caus­ing all of this pain and frus­tra­tion remains the ele­phant in the room until the film’s final stretch, but when it is revealed, it’s poignant rather than sen­sa­tion­al – anti­cli­mac­tic in the best pos­si­ble way.

Jolie-Pitt’s pre­vi­ous two direc­to­r­i­al efforts – 2011’s In the Land of Blood and Hon­ey and 2014’s Unbro­ken – were per­haps not the best pre­cur­sors to By the Sea, and it’s under­stand­able how many would have feared the worst of this new project. But this is stratos­pheres ahead of its fore­bears, in the detail of its con­struc­tion and the inti­mate nature of its emo­tion­al bat­tle­ground. She may have talked about her­self, her pas­sions and her aspi­ra­tions in press inter­views and pro­files, but in By the Sea, she tells us that there’s no uni­form human response to a tragedy. Every­one deals with things (or maybe choses not to?) in their own way.

The fact that this film has been so wide­ly dis­missed is almost a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy. Women in the film indus­try aren’t tak­en as seri­ous­ly as men. Yet what­ev­er you think about how it has been made or what it is say­ing, its sin­cer­i­ty is unas­sail­able. With By the Sea, Jolie-Pitt achieves some­thing far greater and more coura­geous than for­mal refine­ment or rou­tine dra­mat­ic con­sis­ten­cy: she admits to us that she’s extreme­ly sad, and does so in a way which makes us believe her.