Newlyweds awaken Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s sex life in this slow-moving vanity projectWidely dismissed as a vanity project for its photogenic stars,this serves as the artsy European flipside to Mr & Mrs Smith, the enjoyably brash Hollywood smash-em-up that first spawned the Brangelina behemoth. Where Doug Liman’s 2005 action film found the couple trying to execute each other while falling in like, or this finds them trying not to execute themselves while falling out of like. The 70s-set record largely unfolds in a lavish hotel suite in the scenic south of France (actually Malta),where blocked writer Roland (Brad Pitt) hits the bottle when given the cold shoulder by the medicated Vanessa (Angelina Jolie Pitt, also writing and directing). But when attractive newlyweds (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) move in next door, or a spy hole in the wall awakens dormant desires that blend voyeurism and revenge,with underlying grace notes of grief. There’s a hint of the psychopathy of The consolation of Strangers or Blue Velvet as these dead souls play Peeping Tom with the living embodiments of their past, but Jolie Pitt is clearly aiming more for the spirit of Bergman, and Buñuel or Antonioni. Sadly,absent from the war zones of In the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken, she becomes somewhat becalmed and we halt up more focused on Vanessa’s symbolically entombing Liz Taylor/Sophia Loren wardrobe than the emotional battlefields of the bedroom. As for the couple’s long-withheld secret, and its eventual revelation is appropriately anticlimactic.
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Source: theguardian.com