The title of “A Couple,” Frederick Wiseman’s new movie, is both intriguing and a little misleading. Intriguing because it doesn’t make reference to a place, establishment or social issue, as you might expect by now from this 92-year-old master of the institution-centric documentary. And misleading because in the course of this rare dramatic work — Wiseman’s third after “Seraphita’s Diary” (1982) and “The Last Letter” (2002), though stricter fiction/nonfiction semanticists might beg to differ — we meet only one-half of the couple in question.
The title of “A Couple,” Frederick Wiseman’s new movie, is both intriguing and a little misleading. Intriguing because it doesn’t make reference to a place, establishment or social issue, as you might expect by now from this 92-year-old master of the institution-centric documentary. And misleading because in the course of this rare dramatic work — Wiseman’s third after “Seraphita’s Diary” (1982) and “The Last Letter” (2002), though stricter fiction/nonfiction semanticists might beg to differ — we meet only one-half of the couple in question.
She is the writer Sophia Tolstoy, famed for her long, productive and famously tempestuous marriage to Leo Tolstoy, and played here by the French actor Nathalie Boutefeu. The movie, which Boutefeu and Wiseman adapted from Sophia’s personal diaries and letters, is a roughly hourlong monologue, punctuated by rapturous bursts of floral imagery. Some of those flowers decorate the shawl that Sophia wears as she wanders island landscapes of an intense, often otherworldly beauty, all the while giving voice to an intense chronicle of marital devotion and discontent.
“Your power crushed my life,” she declares to her unseen husband,an idea that she has a hundred different ways of elaborating. Leo, she rails, was an erratic and egomaniacal presence, prone to violent mood swings and interested in his wife primarily for her utility.
