ROLAND: Have a nice day.
VANESSA: I won't
ROLAND: I know. Love you.
(DOOR CLOSES)
VANESSA: (SOFTLY) I know.
The main benefit of loving a maligned film from ten years ago is finding a cheap copy of the DVD on Ebay. Paying £3.49 plus shipping to own a disc, whose main titles consist of a static image of a writing desk facing a window, displaying a grainy sea just in the distance, is its own kind of beauty. I've peered through the wall to find what I always wanted to find: hazy, erotic angst staged just out of my reach.
By The Sea (2015) is a tricky film to discuss, with its marital baggage and the general opinion that this was just a vanity project that every actor turned director has to make at some point. The contradictory arguments of critics have been frustrating to pore over, with this film being described as both an uncomfortable confessional and a witholding bore. This romantic drama that takes place mostly in a hotel room follows Vanessa and Roland as they attempt to piece together their dead marriage by supplanting their conflict onto the newly married couple in the next room, narrativising their woes in real time and capturing them within the pages of the book that Roland has been trying to write during their stay. It is a fascinating, neurotic and moody work that keeps the audience at such a distance, the actors barely seem like they are awake. Their autopilot is failing though. The fantasies of the past and future keep seeping through the walls.
More than any of her other features, By The Sea is intensely filmic, both self-conscious of its voyeurism and its status as celebrity biography (whether Jolie likes it or not), as well being in conversation with the glum, European relationship piece. Containing elements of the behaviorist performances in Michelangelo Antonioni's morbid heterosexual films like L'avventura or La Notte, and the apocalyptic theatricality of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, the film is situated within a mode that embraces its distantiation in an attempt to explore the extent that emotionality has been forgotten and replaced with a social script that is driving the characters apart.
It's unsurprising for this film to feel as nakedly personal as it does when you look at how much Jolie's personal life has been enmeshed with her filmography. Her first role was alongside her father, Jon Voight, where she played his estranged daughter in Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, which also starred her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, in the crucial role of 'Girl in Jeep'. Her brother, James Haven, starred alongside her in Gia (1998) and Original Sin (2001), playing very minor roles. Notably, her daughter, Vivienne, was cast in Maleficent (2014) due to the fact that she was the only child actor who wasn't afraid of Jolie in her stage make-up. Most famously, though, she met her ex-husband, Brad Pitt, whilst filming Mr & Mrs Smith (2005), with the scandal of their 'affair' essentially becoming part of the marketing of the film. There is a resignment in the construction of By The Sea that for Jolie as a filmmaker, her life is the movie whether she wants it to be or not.
Angeline Jolie as Vanessa is a deliberate depature from being the second half of Brangelina and the vampy actress she came to embody throughout her work. Finally behind the camera and performing for herself, the portrayal here feels more reminiscent of Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes' suffocating, phobic domestic drama, Safe. Jolie rejects her husky voice and bombastic demeanour, present in Lisa from Girl, Interrupted (1999) for example, becoming soft spoken, clipped and, when she is intelligible, in a much higher register than we are used to. As a filmmaker, she immediately toys with the audience's expectations of these two people who, for most of their relationship, were forced into being one entity. Here, they are separate, emotionally vacant and moving through one another. The light behind the star power is going out. These are the dying days of love, and Jolie asserted that she wasn't quite ready for it to die.
The holiday in the sun becomes a fantasy space in which neuroses are free to play. In the real world, we must work and emote and socialise, but in this pretend space, we are free from our schedules and rules. It's fascinating to position the holiday itself as a freedom from having to be a person, with Vanessa mostly lounging on her balcony or static in her bed, refusing to be touched. Furthermore, the environment exists for these characters, fiction positioned as innately solipsistic. Even the owner of the bar is really a metaphor for the main characters' marriage, his dead wife displaced to a photo which he covertly kisses just in view of Roland to spy on and document for his art. Everything is material for the story, everything is important, Jolie asserts. The humanity is absent because the book is still trying to flourishes under the clumsy emotions of these pathetic little people. In the absence of good literature to devour, Vanessa's only pastime is looking - off the balcony, over the cliff and at her own personal television, also know as the very convenient hole in the wall where a beautiful French couple on their honeymoon are always relaxing and fucking.
The film reflects back to the audience their desire to peep and pry and manoeuvre the doll-like people on the other side of the screen, whilst refusing to actualise these desires. Jeremy Hawthorn argues in his article, Morality, Voyeurism, and 'Point of View', that the voyeur as a character in cinema seeks to combine invisibility with complete control over their subjects, to observe what is lacking and deny themselves the pleasure of touching. I'm reminded of Atom Egoyan's film Next of Kin, where the main character literally exits his life and places himself into another family after watching a video of their therapy session. Egoyan explores the extent that a proxy can become a meaningful stand-in within the family structure. Jolie is not so optimistic, often shadowing Vanessa and Roland in darkness, crouched or slumped against the wall, sated but unfulfilled. Much like Mark in Peeping Tom (1960), killing women with his 'camera dick', the apparatus is still between these characters and the world they are trying wrench life from. The peephole, like the hotel, is a transition, an untenable, infertile place.
The fun part comes when Vanessa deliberately manipulates the couple next door into being her own private play. After a shopping trip, it has become clear that she has bought them clothes so that they resemble her and her husband. She is building up her little toys to break them. Her catharsis is the destruction of something she finds captivating and alien, her amalgam of fantasy and memory, indistinguishable. In the cinema, we can lose ourselves entirely, the giant people on the screen are like us, but so beautiful and so far away. Jolie is clutching your face and screaming, 'Brangelina was never real! We want to die just as much as you do!'
Jolie's inability to sink into endless anguish with her filmmaking is both her greatest strength and weakness. Trying to neatly tie everything together and reassure us (and herself) that everything is okay is an attempt to act as a salve to great emotional pain rather sticking your finger in a wound and then refusing to treat the infection you perpetrated. There is a heart at the centre of this glassy film, despite what critics described. It's one that believes in forgiveness, if only because the confines of the frame are so constricting that the characters have nowhere to go except towards each other.
*
Further Reading:
Swimming Pool (2003, directed by François Ozon)
Unrelated (2007, directed by Joanna Hogg)
Hot Milk (2025, directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz)
Miserable Women in Warm Weather
Veronica Fitzpatrick, Boldly Going Nowhere | Bright Wall/Dark Room
Rafaela Bassili, What Is That, Me? | Bright Wall/Dark Room
Emma Fuchs, Fate & Futility in Eric Rohmer's 'Le Rayon vert' | Bright Wall/Dark Room