With 43 documentary features to his name, some of them among the more major works of cinema chronicling American life and institutions over the past half century, Frederick Wiseman, at 92 years old and counting, remains one of the greatest living non-fiction filmmakers — or simply one of the greatest living filmmakers, period.
So let’s allow him a little digression from his typically absorbing, three-to-four hour documentaries with the modest and very artsy, A Couple (Un couple), an hour-long, nearly nonstop monologue performed by actress and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu, who recites various texts from the writings of Leo Tolstoy’s long scorned wife, Sophia.
Certainly not for everyone, and more like a piece of filmed theatre than a plain old film, Wiseman’s second stab at “fiction” — quotation marks are needed because there are aspects of A Couple that feel closer to documentary, just like there are aspects of Wiseman’s many documentaries that feel closer to classic narrative storytelling — illuminates a part of cultural history often given short shrift in movies and elsewhere: that of a great writer’s spouse existing purely in the shadows of her husband’s genius.
In the case of Sophia, who was married at age 18 to the 34-year-old Tolstoy, at a time when the Russian aristocrat was beginning to gain recognition as a writer (he would publish War and Peace seven years later, achieving immediate acclaim), that existence was clearly no walk in the park. On Wikipedia, biographer A.N. Wilson is paraphrased calling their marriage “one of the unhappiest in literary history.” At least part of the goal of A Couple seems to be to give a voice to Sophia’s suffering, to let her tell her side of the story, with its ups and downs, its passions and deceptions, as if she were a major character in one of her husband’s sprawling epic novels.
Shot in the picturesque French island of Belle-Ile, the film finds Sophie awandering the countryside and openly reflecting on a long and arduous relationship that had her giving birth to thirteen children, eight of whom survived, while also serving as her husband’s secretary and editor, copying out his two major works by hand. Since those works totaled up to roughly 2,000 pages, that meant plenty of handwriting. And let’s not forget that Sophia was raising the kids at the same time, mostly without Leo.
She certainly had enough to be pissed about and doesn’t bother to hide it — “You never apologize,” “Why are you so cold, far and distant?” “I have no life, not even a family life” — but Wiseman and Boutefeu craft a character who’s not only filled with resentment, but also with passion and admiration for Leo, at least at the beginning of their marriage. Then, as in many marriages, things seemed to turn sour, to the point that she’s saying things like: “Wherever you are, the air is contaminated.”
A Couple is not quite an historical chronicle — Tolstoy’s book titles are never specifically mentioned; neither are key dates or facts — but rather a meditation on what it means to live like Sophia did, close to greatness but forever in the background. The film offers a corrective of sorts for a woman who was first shunned by her husband and then by literary history, with Wiseman and Boutefeu using Sophia’s actual texts to guide us.
At just over an hour, the exercise can still seem somewhat rambling and unstructured, closer to a performance piece than to a narrative. Indeed, alongside his documentary career, Wiseman has directed several theatre pieces in France, including a staging of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and an adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate — the latter the subject of an hour-long filmed version similar to this one.
Wiseman shakes off some of the stuffiness of the stage here by allowing Boutefeu to roam Belle-Ile’s fields, forests, swamps, beaches and cliffs, which regular cinematographer John Davey captures in all their lush beauty. There are moments when the landscapes seem to reflect the torment dwelling inside Sophia as she spills her guts, with one scene featuring waves crashing against the shore in a fit of background drama. But mostly, A Couple has a quiet anger to it that’s echoed in Boutefeu’s soft-spoken line readings and onscreen candor, in a bracing performance allowing Sophia Tolstoy to finally say her peace.
