Frederick Wiseman Stunningly Melds Fiction and Documentation in A Couple
Half an hour into Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple, which happens to also be its halfway point, the camera cuts to and rests on a rapid stream of ants crawling on a log. They scrabble over bark, scoot across exposed wood and weave in and out of splintering crevasses. For myrmecophobic viewers, the sequence is a 14-second nightmare. For Wiseman, it’s a clever visual metaphor comparing the way his subject Sophia Tolstoy lived in service to others with the way ants live in service to the colony. The scurrying mass looks chaotic, but it’s all for the sake of achieving an existential harmony humans rarely find.
Wiseman and Nathalie Boutefeu, his star and co-writer, based A Couple on Sophia’s diaries, molding them into a roughly 60-minute dialogue with their audience, performed by Boutefeu, who wanders between verdant gardens, hushed forests and the meandering, gelid shoreline of Belle-Île, an island within spitting distance of Brittany, where the film was shot. Wiseman, 92 years young and rocking the easygoing vigor of a filmmaker in their 30s, chose his location for a handful of reasons. Practically, shooting in a remote setting kept him safe from COVID back when everyone lived in confinement. Dramatically, Belle-Île gave Boutefeu the space necessary to breathe life into Sophia’s angst-wracked missive to her husband, Leo Tolstoy, because to be Sophia was to be cast in his shadow at all times.
The “great man” and “difficult genius” genres tend to install these men as their protagonists while the influential or otherwise important people in their lives orbit them as secondary characters. That blueprint forces viewers to think charitably of their films’ leads, to the extent that choosing them as the leads in the first place humanizes them. Humanizing the inhuman is a meaningful pursuit. Breaking down, say, scientists, politicians or artists to their component parts allows viewers to better understand them as people, which subsequently allows viewers to better appreciate their contributions to society, culture and progress. But by 2022, that blueprint has also grown ratty around the edges and whether by design or not, A Couple interrogates it, with the simple, innocent choice to focus on Sophia.
Boutefeu enjoys all of A Couple’s oxygen. Belle-Île gave her limitless freedom to bond with Sophia’s spirit and channel her myriad feelings about her legendarily irascible husband, hopelessly tangled with one another as they are: In the same scene, even in the same sentence, Sophia takes emotional journeys that start with earnest love for Leo, shift to anger, bleed into grief and settle down back into love again. Listening to her reminiscences gives the impression that being married to Leo meant spending 30 years and change on a rollercoaster. The part of him that loved Sophia was every bit as sincere as the part of him that resented and loathed her, and worst of all, as the part of him that simply didn’t care enough to pay her any mind. That’s the cost of being hitched to great, difficult, genius men, A Couple suggests.