It has happened at least twice before, so we should not really be shocked by it. It’s part of the game, so to speak.

The first episode took place many years ago, under the PN administration led by George Borg Olivier. In 1969, Anthony Newley directed the beach scenes of his flawed Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness starring Joan Collins at Ir-Ramla Bay.

Before shooting the nude scenes, the directors moved the stone statue of the Madonna (a vow of thanksgiving for surviving a shipwreck) from the middle of the beach.

These two facts created a perfect storm in deeply-religious Gozo. With an election coming up, the Labour Party milked it for everything it was worth.

In any event, the film – despite its main actress and its director – flopped and sank without trace.

Next on this quirky list of films shot in Malta that flopped, was in October 2001 – Madonna’s Swept Away, once called Love, Sex, Drugs and Money, with her then husband Guy Ritchie as both producer and director. This was “so terrible that, even though few people have actually seen the thing, there’s no doubt it’s going to be bad” according to the Sunday Express in a two-page spread, splashing two decades of lousy film reviews to Madonna’s credit.

What was worse than the film’s flop was a testy remark made later by Madonna in respect of Malta, which was the equivalent of “Malta, yuk!”

Now we have the third such episode. Angelina Jolie’s film By the Sea has just been released and has been a huge flop. What we have heard here is that it sank at the box office. We have not heard how bad it is and, worse, how it gives bad publicity to Malta.

The following is Camilla Long’s review of the film from last Sunday’s Sunday Times’ review.

“There is always a risk of dismissing Angelina Jolie’s films as empty vanity projects, written and directed by a Hollywood princess, in which the acting is bad and the script is even worse. Her productions (including last year’s Unbroken) are so preposterous, so faintly conceived and whimsically realised, that she is swiftly becoming the new Madonna.

“At first glance, her latest, By the Sea – the story of a marriage near to collapse, starring Jolie and her husband, Brad Pitt – does seem to have been dreamt up by a bunch of hairdressers and personal trainers.

“It bears alarming similarities to the gloomy erotic dirge Swept Away, in which Madonna writhed mirthlessly (and pantlessly) around on a beach under the instruction of her (clearly broken) then husband, Guy Ritchie.

“Jolie, as director of this film, has cast herself not quite as a bored socialite, but as a bored retired dancer, Nessa, a woman who resents her husband, Roland (Pitt), a second-rate writer who is trying to resuscitate his career. Both arrive in the south of France for a break: Nessa is a thin, fading starlet, complete with bottles of pills, plumped lips and a face cremated in make-up. Roland, a tired, leathery type, is also past his prime. So far, so good.

“As they unpack their things, however, the mood changes. Nessa slips into a series of ever more complicated and luscious silk negligees. She presents one breast – then the other. Her nipples strain through pussy-bow blouses and satin. They manifest – urgently, one nipple always slightly off-centre – in the shower during a dramatic scene in which the couple thrash out their (uninteresting) troubles towards the end of the film. Watching as Jolie sat in the bath, weeping, her quivering, squinting, boobs surfing the waterline, a great, brimming suspicion suddenly washed over me. By the Sea is less a film, more an opportunity for Jolie to officially unveil her new breasts.

“She began directing this film about a year after she announced that she’d had a double mastectomy to reduce the risk of breast cancer (her mother died of the disease). By the time she arrived in Malta for filming last year (the island has a suitably dusty, exhausted, second-rate atmosphere), she’d had impressive surgery to restore them. Little did anyone realise that after a slew of articles and interviews about her decision to go for the knife, the next step would be a sweeping, $10 million promotional video.

“Jolie appears to have spent more time picking out lingerie and arranging it in silk and satin than writing the script or even getting her husband to act. But here’s the thing. As a cinematic experience I can think of things worse than two hours of eyeballing Angelina Jolie’s breasts. Nearly all the blockbusters I’ve seen this year, for example; nearly all the other art-house movies in which couples try to ‘work it out’. Fifty Shades of Grey, Ant-Men, all the other Marvel films – all considerably less interesting than this movie, which is well-conceived and smoothly made, like a very talkative (sometimes too talkative) photo-shoot.

“It has the added attraction of being an old-fashioned Hollywood vehicle, of the sort Burton and Taylor might have embraced when they were drunk and fat, late in their careers. It is fascinating to watch this generation’s most exciting, ridiculous, vain, silly couple attempt the same thing.

“To her credit, Jolie has struggled hard to present a sense of dirtiness and fatigue – the idea that Brad and she are also fading. The town in which they are staying is lined not only with topless bikini babes but with rubbish. The bar where Roland drinks gin for breakfast is the weather-beaten sort of place the long-dead bonk-buster writer Harold Robbins might have escaped to between paragraphs about erections.

“During one of Roland’s long excursions at this bar, Nessa discovers a spyhole behind a table that allows her to eavesdrop on a couple next door (so Madonna). She watches as they eat fruit and have sex. She has thoughts of sex herself. She cries. Soon Roland also discovers the spyhole, joining Nessa on a strangulated erotic journey so inadequate and frustrated that the spyhole itself seems to be dripping. A dripping spyhole. Hmmm. Only a director of Jolie’s calibre could come up with that.

“Who will see this film? I suppose there are enough Brangelina fans to fill a few cinemas. And it is fascinating to watch them slink about their hotel suite, combing their hair and trying on clothes, presumably something they do a lot of in real life anyway. Jolie has described this as a personal project, and it is obvious that she is in some ways playing someone similar to her mother, the actress Marcheline Bertrand, whose marriage to Jon Voight broke down in the 1970s. (This is set in the same period). But its themes and conceits are flimsy, its denouement predictable and schlocky, which leaves little except Jolie’s sumptuous bras and straining new nipples.”

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