Hence, after a rough jump over the pond (more chop on the flight than I normally like—my “like” percentage is none, but it was bad even by seasoned flyer standards I’d reckon), I got here on Friday and was able to see a single film, the new picture by venerable documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who was in attendance for the premiere of “A Couple.” He’s 92, so I have no grounds for complaint about my trip, I reckon.
The weather here is gorgeous, by the way, warm and with a humidity level that doesn’t quite tilt into the uncomfortable. It’s pleasant enough that I’m writing this from the patio of my hotel on the Lido, despite the fact that the mosquitoes are voluminous and ravenous and brazen and are eating me alive when I’m not swatting them (one of them just landed on one of my knuckles—who DOES that?).
This gorgeous and stirring picture is a late-career curveball from Wiseman. First off, it’s only an hour and change in length—Wiseman’s immersive documentaries, examinations of power hierarchies in a variety of different life settings, sometimes hit the 200-minute mark. Second, it’s not a documentary, in spite of all the spoken words in it originating from real people. Third, title notwithstanding, only one person appears on screen.
Wiseman wrote the film (which is in French) with the protean French actress Nathalie Boutefeu, who here plays Sophia Tolstoy, the wife of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. The film’s monologue, such as it is, was drawn from her diary and her letters, and from Leo’s letters to her.
Dressed in a simple outfit suggestive of the turn of the 19th century to the 20th, complete with a shawl that has a floral design that corresponds to the gardens she sometimes walks through, Boutefeu’s Sophia speaks to her husband with tenderness and longing at first. She sometimes speaks directly to the camera, sometimes to the sea, or the distance. Her tenderness turns to indignation, then anger. A woman of no inconsiderable talent for writing, she is dropped into the position of The Great Man’s Wife (in fact she was Leo’s copyist for War and Peace; consider the potential for irritation there) and calls him out not just on that account but on account of him showing more consideration for his serfs than for her. “The poet burns and consumes others,” she says, and she’s not wrong. And eventually she comes back around to tenderness and longing. The film is a remarkably concentrated work. Elegant, graceful, purposefully bristling.