In By The Sea, a grieving couple arrives at a seaside town in France, a picturesque hamlet fronted by gravel beaches and craggy outcrops. He's Roland, a struggling writer, and he's played by Brad Pitt in what looks like a clear reminiscence of Ernest Hemingway. She's Vanessa, a dancer and a woman in irredeemable sorrow, and she's played by Angelina Jolie-Pitt, her face smeared by a haze of 1970s-style eyeshadow in what looks like a demented version of Sophia Lauren or Monica Vitti.
The couple were once "a toast of New York". Now they're unhappy, very unhappy, and the best way (or the worst, they're not sure but they have no choice) to be unhappy is to follow that American tradition of coming to enlightened Europe and drinking themselves out of that unnamed misery.
Directed by Jolie-Pitt, By The Sea is an American film with a European arthouse aspiration. It remains an aspiration through most of the 150 minutes, a slow, gorgeous drift through sunny torpor and beautiful sorrow. Vanessa hardly leaves her hotel room, while Roland goes out to a local café to scribble in his moleskin notebook and learns life lessons from the homely owner (Niels Arestrup).
The film kicks into a sort of a plot when a younger, happier couple arrives and checks into the next room. They're newlyweds Francois and Lea (Melvis Poupard and Melanie Laurent), and through a hole in the wall Vanessa begins to spy on them having sex, and such enthusiastic voyeurism only compounds her dark compulsion and emotional breakdown.
Jolie-Pitt, as director, is wading into the territory of Antonioni's bourgeois disaffection -- with beautiful people in a beautiful yet barren landscape, nursing their grief by smoking, drinking and watching the sea. But it takes much more than this to make art out of inertia, and to lay bare the emotional nakedness in a bid to exorcise the demon in a married couple's bedroom (that's John Cassavette).
By The Sea is heavy on mood, though it doesn't translate into the genuine drama of a marriage in crisis, and there are too many moments when the two actors seems self-conscious in their roles, and in their knowledge of being an American power-couple attempting a small, intimate, psychologically wrought European-like film.
