Jason says: “BY THE
SEA is the sort of movie I would have called boring as a younger man,
and I wouldn’t back away from the word here but for the craftsmanship
being so impeccable. It’s a film that often seems to encourage
dissection rather than reaction, paradoxically demanding close
attention despite not always doing much to seize it.
“The sea is the Mediterranean, the time is the 1970s, when an American
writer by the name of Roland (Brad Pitt) and his wife Vanessa (Angelina
Jolie Pitt) are checking into a hotel in the South of France for an
extended stay. Roland intends to work on a new book, which seems to
involve spending a great deal of time drinking in the cafe operated by
Michel (Niels Arestrup) while Vanessa spends most of her time in the
room or on the patio with her pills, not wanting to be there or
anywhere, really, at least until discovering a peephole that allows her
to spy on the newlywed couple next door (Mélanie Laurent &
Melvil
Poupaud).
“It’s a marvelously positioned void, really, placed just where the
viewer will buy into Vanessa finding it while Lea and François
do not,
despite being large enough to afford more than a narrow line of sight.
It probably makes things easier for cinematographer Christian Berger’s
camera, as well. The many shots through the hole cannot help but
highlight the illicit nature or the glance – it’s a perfect circle in
the middle of a widescreen image – but there’s also a flatness to those
images that keeps what we’re seeing from being far away. It’s almost a
TV screen meant to be watched, especially given how perfectly placed a
mirror is to show what might otherwise be out of sight without
overburdening the image. It feels meant for them (and us) to watch.
“The cinematography is impressively precise in many other ways; Berger
and Mrs. Pitt (who also wrote and directed) repeat a lot of shots, each
of them beautiful, showing the same image at different parts of the
day, ever-changing but, despite the changing colors, always the same
underneath. A fisherman in a small boat often rows through these scene,
and Vanessa comments on how he doesn’t seem to catch much. It seems
futile to her, a pattern that can’t be broken. When the couple arrived
at the hotel, they wordlessly rearranged furniture, perhaps to match
their home; they, clearly have their own patterns to break out of.
“They at least seem to be doing so, at least halfway through, and
that’s also intriguing to watch. The director is kind of ruthless with
how she uses her particular beauty in this movie; always tremendously
angular despite her curves, she and the make-up crew make Vanessa look
withered, with sunken eyes and an otherwise worn appearance, one Mr.
Pitt echoes, though not quite strongly. They actually seem to
revitalize as the film goes on, and the actors do a nifty job of
filling out the corners of their characters, finding ways to push them
into new areas or reveal their history.
“They’ve got some help on the acting front, too – although the Pitts
are front and center through the entire movie, Larent & Poupaud are
solid support. The pair are deliberately simple, but they both play
well against whichever Pitt they are paired with or as part of a group.
The biggest delight, though, is probably Niels Arestrup as Michel; it’s
a joy to watch him play off Brad Pitt, with Michel sincerely
befriending Roland but also projecting that this is hardly the first
tourist that he has seen on a precipice.
“So with all that going for it, why not love BY THE SEA unreservedly?
Perhaps because, for all that Angelina Jolie Pitt attends to every
detail of her film, what’s eventually revealed at the center is almost
too exactly what one would expect, and while I’m not going to suggest
that where the story goes isn’t dramatic or deeply personal for the
filmmaker after what she’s been through in recent years, it becomes a
great deal of ornamentation for an oft-told story. Maybe not every
story needs a spark at the center, but the impacts here often feel
muffled, and not in a way where the soft impact is a pleasant surprise
when a blowup is expected.
“Still, what BY THE SEA does well, it does very well indeed, and the
audience interested in a movie that invites this sort of examination
should be pleased by what it finds. It’s not conventionally exciting,
but it bears up to examination in a way many films don’t. 4 cats
“Seen 22 November 2015 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)” |
