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Uncanny coincidence? Or cunning marketing ploy? The first trailer for Brad Pitt's new film, 'Allied', a World War Two romantic drama directed by Robert Zemeckis ('Back to the Future', 'Flight'), dropped just a few hours after it was announced yesterday that Pitt's wife, Angelina Jolie, had filed for divorce from the actor.
Whatever the background to the trailer's appearance, 'Allied' sees Pitt play a US intelligence officer, Max Vatan, who meets French resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard) during a mission behind enemy lines in Casablanca.
At first, Max and Marianne enter a sham marriage as part of their undercover work together – but soon they properly fall in love and move to London to start a new life together. Inevitably, that isn't the whole story, and the trailer suggests that Marianne might not be all that she seems.
The film opens in the UK in November, and it's written by 'Peaky Blinders' writer and creator Steven Knight, whose previous movies include 'Eastern Promises' and 'Locke'. No one's seen 'Allied' yet, so it remains to be seen whether it will figure as part of the awards conversations as we head to the end of the year.
What's inevitable, though, is that commentators on Pitt and Jolie's divorce will look to the movie's publicity campaign and the movie itself for any hint of insight into what's going on in Jolie and Pitt's private lives, just as the 2005 spy comedy 'Mr and Mrs Smith' was scrutinised as the movie that started their relationship and 2015's 'By the Sea', which starred them both and which Jolie wrote and directed, is now seen as the movie that chronicled the beginning of the end.
'Allied' opens in UK cinemas on Friday November 25.