A Couple
Photo: Zipporah Films

A Couple Review: Frederick Wiseman Gets Personal

A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins.

Across more than 50 years, Frederick Wiseman has established himself as America’s preeminent documentarian, crafting sprawling portraits of institutions both public and private in rich, Balzacian detail. The raw material of Wiseman’s art has typically been the workaday mundanities of civic life—meetings, public hearings, and the like—from which he weaves complex, novelistic narratives about the genius and limitations of human organizations.

Now, after a string of particularly virtuosic (and lengthy) works about the roles that public institutions play in our daily lives, Wiseman offers something a little left field: A Couple, a barely hour-long fiction feature consisting of nothing more than one actor reciting excerpts from the diaries and correspondence of Sophia Tolstoy, wife of the exalted Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

The film, a collaboration with Nathalie Boutefeu, who stars as Sophia and co-wrote the script with Wiseman, isn’t quite unprecedented for the vaunted documentarian, whose little-seen 1982 film Seraphita’s Diary is a fictional, female-fronted one-hander. It is, nevertheless, a highly unusual detour for Wiseman, not just because it represents a deviation from his usual “reality fiction” style, but because it may just be the most personal film he’s ever made.

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A plein air text recital that recalls Straub-Huillet works such as Workers, Peasants and These Encounters of Theirs, A Couple places Sophia against the coastal backdrop of Belle-île-en-Mer, the French island off the coast of Brittany. The island’s lush beauty, verdant forests, hushed ponds, and picturesque seaside are juxtaposed against Sophia’s sorrowful, searing monologues.

Delivered by Boutefeu with an unvarnished directness that cuts straight to the soul, Sophia’s words are an extended, heart-rending j’accuse against her husband’s jealousy, mood swings, and sexist self-entitlement. Leo, the great genius, has been free to carry on his life, pursuing his artistic ambitions, while his wife—so young, vibrant, and full of energy when the two wed—has been gradually rolled beneath his massive ego. Or, as Sophia puts it near the start of the film, “Your strength has shattered me. Your power crushed my life and my personality as well.”

Sophia continues to air her grievances as A Couple progresses, but while the nuances of her relationship with Leo take on greater complexity, Wiseman largely resists giving the film any narrative shape. Instead, the script circles the same few themes with subtle variations in emotional texture, ranging from anger and bitterness to a tender ruefulness.

All the while, Wiseman offsets Sophia’s fluctuating mood with some of his most captivating and atmospheric pillow shots since Monrovia, Indiana. Ranging from close-ups of rain-dappled leaves to panoramic vistas of waves crashing against rocks, these shots of nature enhance Sophia’s psychological turmoil while also pulling viewers outside of it, in the process reminding us that, in the end, the natural world is indifferent to our troubles.

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A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins. Despite its slightness of form, it provides a provocative, if cloudy, window into the emotional world of the man behind the camera. This is, after all, the first film Wiseman has made since the death of his wife, Zipporah, and its concerns about the gender dynamics of power within heterosexual relationships echo those of Zipporah herself, a renowned legal scholar who pioneered an explicitly feminist analysis of the law. It’s hard not to wonder what exactly drew the recently widowed Wiseman to this material, given the bleak view the film paints of marriages between strong, ambitious people. Is this some kind of posthumous mea culpa? Does Wiseman see himself in the difficult, domineering Leo Tolstoy?

We can’t know the answers to those questions, but the film nevertheless enriches our understanding of Wiseman’s art by stripping away so much of what normally defines his films. All the public institutions and private establishments with which Wiseman’s work is typically concerned are really just elaborate means of defining, enhancing, and navigating our relationships with each other. A Couple drills down on one of the most basic of our social structures—marriage—and finds it to be even more fraught with division and thwarted expectations than juvenile court, the welfare office, or Boston’s city hall.

Score: 
 Director: Frederick Wiseman  Screenwriter: Nathalie Boutefeu, Frederick Wiseman  Distributor: Zipporah Films  Running Time: 63 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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