A car is speeding up along a deserted highway, scenic now and craggy and bleak next. In the car are two of the most good-looking tourists this side of the Mediterranean. The wide-brimmed hat reveals the glorious cheekbones of Angelina Jolie. The other passenger, no less attractive, is Brad Pitt, his looks a bit diminished by the most unfashionable eyeglasses and a kind of mustache in disarray. We can guess the actor is getting into a character, while Jolie is secure her extraordinary allure can always bring her portrayal beyond the sea
When the film fell upon my lap with the graciousness of a friend, it cemented the stereotype of critics as people who can bear to watch any kind of film, or endure the most boring of them all.
The first time I tried to watch By the Sea, I ejected the disc out of the laptop for later viewing or, perhaps, never to do so at all. It was deathly boring. One day, on cable TV, a film so dark it was already breathtaking was playing. It was the same film I had shelved days ago.
“Breathtaking” is one word to describe By the Sea if we are to contend with its location and setting. For one, the sea that encircles the town seems unmoving at certain places. Except for a limited beach, the sea that characters look out to from their hotel or the town is not the kind of blueness one swims in but a depth that is ideal for plunging in—and drowning.
Pitt and Jolie are Roland and Vanessa, husband and wife. Roland is a writer facing a block and hoping to be inspired by the place they have chosen for their vacation. Vanessa, all throughout, remains cold and withdrawn. She doesn’t join her husband who has taken to drinking every day in a local café. Roland, in his daily routine, befriends Michel, the owner of the café. Michel lost his wife some years back but he goes on with his life.
The every day collides with the acutely dreary in the life of Roland and Vanessa, especially with the latter. Each morning, she notices this fisherman who puts out to sea, comes back at the end of day contented with a few catch.
Roland and Vanessa become friends with a young newly married couple next to their apartment. The two, Lea and Francois, are facing all the happy possibilities of two people in love and beginning their life together. Roland and Vanessa have lost these.
Vanessa discovers a hole left by an old pipe and she uses this to spy on the couple having sex. Roland also finds out about them, and the two start viewing through the hole the most intimate activities of Lea and Francois.
The metaphors of plenty and loss theatrically and naturally gathered like wild bouquet save this film from indulgence. When Roland and Vanessa leave the rooms, we really do not care what happens to them. But Roland goes to a place with so many people and yet unable to be with any of them. He observes but where he will employ the things he sees is wasted by way of a notebook full of scribblings and a typewriter not producing anything.
But it is when they are outside the room that the world outside or down the balcony of their room comes alive. The sea becomes frighteningly deep and lonely; the streets of the town are grand solitude at dusk. When Vanessa looks at the sea, we are seduced into thinking that she will commit suicide. The plot indulges us because when Roland comes home, his face shows the fear about his wife not coming back anymore, dead or alive. But Vanessa comes home each time, and each time, the misery and pang mount up into dolorous quantity.
It’s not easy watching Jolie as Vanessa going through agony and distress. She makes them not only real but necessary, and that makes for a stressful viewing. Pitt’s Roland is left helpless. When he comes home the first night of drinking out, he slumps on the bed and asks if there is any food, then passes out. One night, finally he brings home dinner, and there is no satisfaction for this couple, just this tentative feeling that things will be alright. Deep within themselves, any minute, another confrontation shall erupt, more recriminations will be exhumed, and the night will once more be a wake without any identifiable corpse.
Brad Pitt’s Roland makes sorrow masculine and dapper. On one of those rare nights that Vanessa agrees to go for a ride with him, Roland takes his wife to dinner. The concern of Vanessa is that she is not dressed for the affair. In the restaurant, Roland delivers a most poignant request that they dance.
The resolution of the plot, which basically describes in part the reason for Vanessa’s torment, comes late. We do not really need it to understand the couple. The fact that they are hurting each moment is already a story, a show mounted by Pitt and Jolie.
What will stay in our mind is Angelina Jolie in beige and white, in black and white, in white and white, slender and almost a dying swan. She walks down the steps hewn from the hard, white rocks, wearing high-heels even as her husband has warned her already about her shoe choice. But we know she will not slip or fall. She is a beautiful mountain goat unafraid of heights; she is a woman scared of other things that are not of those cliffs, nor anything by the sea.
We can talk of the dark poetry of By the Sea but let’s not forget about those big, big hats that frame the luscious angles of Angelina Jolie’s face. The screenplay has already allowed her to revel in the blackest of emotions but Christian Berger, the cinematographer, has something else in mind: to provide Jolie a vibrant space where melodrama and sheer beautiful photography face off in a tension that makes us smile or even applaud as the actress stages her own walk bordering on grand opera and fashion show.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie speak French in many scenes, with the former having significantly more lines in French. This provides a charm of its own.
Jolie directs By the Sea from a story also written by her. The couple produced the film, which is distributed by Universal. Released on DVD in mid-2016, the film is both an exorcism and a lament for a true love lost. In real life, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, once the world’s charmed power couple, have since separated.