A Couple (Un Couple) follows a long-term relationship between a man and a woman. The man is Leo Tolstoy. The woman is his wife, Sophia. Leo and Sophia Tolstoy were married for 36 years, had 13 children. Each kept a diary. A Couple is Sophia’s monologue about the joys and struggles of their life together, loosely drawn from her diary and their letters to each other.
A Couple (French: Un Couple) is a 2022 French-language drama film directed by Frederick Wiseman. Featuring a solo performance by Nathalie Boutefeu as Sophia Tolstaya, the wife of Leo Tolstoy, the film consists of her monologues, which Wiseman and Boutefeu adapted from Tolstaya’s letters and diaries. It is Wiseman’s first narrative film since The Last Letter (2002), and his first ever that is shot on location rather than being a filmed play.
After working on a French-language production of The Belle of Amherst, Wiseman and Boutefeu developed the script based on Tolstaya’s writings. The film was shot on Belle-Île off the coast of Brittany.A Couple premiered in competition at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in September 2022. It is set to screen at the New York Film Festival in October 2022, and to receive a theatrical release at Film Forum in New York City in November 2022.
Film Review for A Couple
Frederick Wiseman has often said that his documentaries strive to be fair to the events he experienced during shooting. They are, in a sense, films about hearing others out. The people in them are given time to present themselves with real complexity, in ways that aren’t necessarily exciting at every moment. Wiseman often allows scenes to play out at great length.
Viewed in that light, “A Couple” is not as much of a departure for the 92-year-old director as it might appear. Over more than 50 years and upward of 40 movies, it is only Wiseman’s third feature that could qualify as a dramatic work, after the Holocaust monologue “The Last Letter,” from 2002, which Wiseman also directed for the stage, and the out-of-distribution “Seraphita’s Diary,” from 1982. (Surely by coincidence, Wiseman has been drawn to this mode precisely every 20 years — although according to an interview with Indiewire from August, he considers “A Couple” his first true fiction film.)
“A Couple” stars the French actress Nathalie Boutefeu as Sophia Tolstoy, who married the “War and Peace” author Leo Tolstoy when she was 18, half his age. The title has a tinge of irony to it, because this is a one-woman movie. Its principal concern is giving the less famous half of a literary marriage her say.
The screenplay, by Wiseman and Boutefeu, is loosely based on Sophia’s diary and on letters written to her by Leo. After a flurry of scene-setting images — clouds, waves, a bird — that wouldn’t be out of place as interstitial shots in one of Wiseman’s documentaries, a costumed Boutefeu appears, silently at first, looking out at the water and the rocky shoreline from a cliff. “A Couple” was filmed throughout a sprawling garden on Belle Île, an island off the coast of Brittany. The solitude and crashing waves give it a female-gothic ambience. The sense is that Sophia has been banished or cast away.
Over the following hour, Sophia, speaking as if she were writing to Leo, shares a narrative of a union that was, with respect to “Anna Karenina,” hardly unhappy in a unique way. She describes Leo as mercurial, jealous and prone to rages — a demanding husband and father who, in 30 years, never spent time at the bedside of a sick child.
“You live entirely in your head, in your thoughts, in what you want to create,” Sophia says, noting that when he is with his family, he is present in a way “more separate than real separation.” She quotes him as saying that his life and his writing are the same, as if art could be used to justify neglect. (While Wiseman has dismissed the idea that Leo Tolstoy is in any way supposed to correspond to him, it is difficult to completely suppress that thought. He has spoken of his editing process as being similar to constructing a novel — and of course, for a prolific nonfiction director, art comes straight from life.)
At times Boutefeu, unusually for a Wiseman film, looks directly at the camera as she speaks, an effect that periodically turns her outpourings into an audience-implicating j’accuse. But this slow, serene film is hardly a polemic, certainly not by the standards of a filmmaker who, however much he eschews explicit editorializing, has made some of the most lucid critiques of American society in movies.
Even at 63 minutes, “A Couple” is not an easy sit. It took me three viewings before I was able to become absorbed in it — to settle into the rhythms of Boutefeu’s performance, to find the monologues less monotonous, to admire the beauty of the garden that Wiseman uses so calmingly to counterpoint the anger of Sophia’s words. If Wiseman has so often turned his camera on the sprawl and imperfections of institutions, this is a portrait of an individual, isolated and pushing back.
A Couple (2022)
Un Couple
Directed by: Frederick Wiseman
Starring: Nathalie Boutefeu
Screenplay by: Nathalie Boutefeu, Frederick Wiseman
Production Design by:
Cinematography by: John Davey
Film Editing by: Frederick Wiseman
Music by: Nathalie Boutefeu
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Météore Films (2022) (France), MTV Documentary Films (United States)
Release Date: November 11, 2022
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