A Couple (2022, Frederick Wiseman) (Patreon)

37/100

Less baldly theatrical than The Last Letter—Wiseman's previous non-doc that's an hour-long monologue of suffering delivered by a middle-aged woman—if only because this time he's placed the actor in nature rather than onstage, constantly moving her from one gorgeous location to another on Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany. Alas, there's probably no backdrop on Earth that could get me actively interested in this dramatic recitation of Sophia Tolstaya's letters and diaries, which amounts to an epistolary version of the passive-victim dynamic I constantly complain about. As always, it's not that I don't empathize with the person's ordeal (if anything, I empathize too much); living with Tolstoy was undoubtedly a nightmare, and maybe there's something to be said for a film that addresses it without making his abuse and callousness "entertainment," in the same way that e.g. Tower ignores Charles Whitman to focus exclusively on his surviving victims. But I found those testimonies deeply moving—in large part because so many of them involve people courageously coming to each other's aid—whereas Tolstaya, in taking her husband to task, however justifiably, often sounds a bit whiny. "My vitality and my cheerfulness trigger your anger and suspicion," she'll tell him, skating dangerously close to "How come I'm so awesome and you suck so hard?" One-sided castigation of this sort just isn't interesting to me, irrespective of its subject; as much as I currently despise, say, Elon Musk, I have no desire to watch someone recite the harshest excerpts from various articles detailing his many personal and professional failings. So I tuned out, paying far more attention to where Boutefeu was standing/sitting than to what she-as-Tolstaya was saying. Lovely interstitial shots, too, serving as breaks in the text, but then we already know he excels at those from his documentaries.