By the Sea (2015)
Directed by Angelina Jolie
No — By the Sea is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Angelina Jolie writes, directs, and stars in this study of a marriage dissolving in a French resort town during the mid-1970s.
Consciousness Markers
Written and directed by a woman and centered on a female protagonist's grief, sexuality, and agency, but it is a personal arthouse character study rather than a thesis-driven feminist statement.
The cast is overwhelmingly white and European, with no deliberate push for diverse representation; the French supporting players exist naturally in the setting rather than as a statement.
A TMDB keyword tags the film with 'borderline personality disorder,' and Vanessa's withdrawn, self-destructive behavior gestures at mental-health struggle, but the film never explicitly frames or advocates around neurodivergence.
This is a slow, moody arthouse melodrama that observes rather than preaches; it carries no overt moralizing or message-delivery.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
Race is entirely absent as a theme; the film concerns a white American couple in a French resort town.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No economic critique or class-consciousness messaging appears in the film.
No body-positivity themes or messaging are present.
The 1970s French setting is atmospheric backdrop, not a revisionist reframing of historical events.
Why it received this score
Angelina Jolie writes, directs, and stars in this study of a marriage dissolving in a French resort town during the mid-1970s. Vanessa, a former dancer, keeps to the hotel room and grieves a loss the screenplay guards for most of its runtime. Roland, her novelist husband, drinks at the bar and does not write. A disused pipe leaves a hole in the wall, and through it the two watch the honeymooners next door. The film is slow, sunlit, and interior. Natural light falls on stone and water. Conversation falls on very little. It is a mood piece, and the mood is damp.
As a document of social consciousness, the picture is thin on the ground. A woman holds the pen and the camera, and her protagonist's grief, appetite, and small cruelties drive what plot there is. That is a personal reckoning, not a platform. There is no LGBTQ content, no engagement with race, no environmental worry, no critique of money, no body-positivity framing. The single thread brushing against modern therapeutic vocabulary, Vanessa's withdrawn and self-destructive behavior, stays texture. The film never organizes itself around it. A metadata keyword tags her with a personality disorder. The screenplay declines to diagnose, let alone advocate.
So we get a film that observes and does not sermonize, which in the current climate reads almost as restraint. It has the patience of a European art film and the star wattage of a celebrity honeymoon, and it returned roughly three million dollars on a ten million dollar budget. The camera adores its leads. Audiences, largely, did not. We are left with beauty, inertia, and a very quiet room.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Set in France during the mid-1970s, Vanessa, a former dancer, and her husband Roland, an American writer, travel the country together. They seem to be growing apart, but when they linger in one quiet, seaside town they begin to draw close to some of its more vibrant inhabitants, such as a local bar/café-keeper and a hotel owner.
Questions about By the Sea
Is By the Sea woke?
No — By the Sea is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does By the Sea have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Feminist Agenda at 25.
How does By the Sea compare to other 2015 movies?
It ranks #151 of the 289 films from 2015 we've scored; their average is 15. The wokest is Chi-Raq (78).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.