A Couple (Frederick Wiseman, 2022) (Patreon)

Only Wiseman's second excursion into fiction filmmaking*, A Couple displays a fairly radical idea of what fiction actually is. His first non-documentary, 2002's The Last Letter, was also a compact, intensive examination of a single female performer, Catherine Samie. But that production was essentially stagebound, a kind of documentary (or at least a document) of a theatrical performance Wiseman directed for the Comédie Française. By contrast, A Couple involves a scouted location which is meant to signify something other than itself. This is a film shot out of doors in a variety of different spots in a vast French garden, which functions in the narrative as the grounds of the main character's estate. 

That main character is Sophia Tolstaya (Nathalie Boutefeu), the wife of the greatest novelist in Russian literature. A one-woman show set against somewhat indifferent natural surroundings, A Couple finds Sophia articulating the psychological toll that her marriage has taken on her, despite (or maybe because of) her resolute love for Leo Tolstoy. In just over an hour, Wiseman and Boutefeu (who co-wrote the script, adapted from Tolstaya's diaries) provide a carefully crafted emotional portrait of a woman who married at 18, gave birth to thirteen children, only eight of whom survived to adulthood. She describes running the household, being the children's sole involved parent, and reading and correcting her husband's manuscripts. And with far less bitterness than sheer regret, Sophia wonders whether she has wasted her life.

For a film so spare, A Couple has many mutually defining elements. Sophia's monologue, and Boutefeu's firm, modulated delivery of it, describe the particulars of a relationship that in some senses is every relationship between partners of unequal success and stature. Granted, pre-feminist history firmly dictated that Sophia would subordinate her desires to those of her husband, regardless of who he may have been. But Sophia's plaint is one that many have shared and that feminism has framed but not dispelled. The life of the mind must always have a material basis. Someone much cook, clean, raise the children, and in heterosexual relationships this burden almost always falls upon the woman. But more than this, A Couple reminds us that every grand creative act is made possible by someone else's labor, and that this labor ought to be understood as an intimate component of that joint achievement.

Several commentators have remarked on A Couple's similarity to the films of Straub and Huillet, and Wiseman's decision to stage Sophia's monologue as a series of outdoor recordings, with sounds of the sea, the birds, and the insects wafting through the frame, is reminiscent of the pair's direct-sound staged reading films like Othon and The Death of Empedocles. What's more, the primary themes of A Couple hew very closely to those of Straub-Huillet's landmark The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. But Straub-Huillet wouldn't make a film that engages in as much editing as A Couple, and Wiseman's inserted close-ups of the surrounding flora have much more in common with the recent films of Nathaniel Dorsky, particularly his Arboretum Cycle.

The fact that Wiseman foregrounds natural forms in A Couple certainly feels a bit avant-garde. But I think he is incorporating these warm sunlit shots as a way of offering an objective metaphor for Sophia Tolstaya's situation. Not only are these shots intended to represent the garden and grounds for which she, as the mistress of the manor, is ultimately responsible. These close-ups mirror those of Boutefeu and contrast with the more holistic shots that place Sophia within the garden. When we see the flowers up close, we forget that they are natural forms only in part. This is a planned landscape, curated and pruned and manicured. Much like Sophia herself, these plants are examples of life that have been subjected to a dominant order, even subjugated against their own innate tendencies. Over the course of A Couple, we get a real sense of who Sophia really is, but we are forcefully reminded that she has no choice but to bloom as radiantly as possible where she has been planted.

*Note: this excludes Wiseman's two-minute introduction for the Yugoslavian omnibus film I Miss Sonia Henie. The less said about Henie the better, but Wiseman's stock-still, Warholian portrait of its performers is the film's best moment by some distance.