A Couple – first-look review | Little White Lies

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A Cou­ple – first-look review

02 Sep 2022

Words by Rafa Sales Ross

A person wearing a white shirt and black jacket, with braided brown hair, looking directly at the camera with a serious expression.
A person wearing a white shirt and black jacket, with braided brown hair, looking directly at the camera with a serious expression.
Fred­er­ick Wise­man reflects on the rela­tion­ship between Leo Tol­stoy and his wife Sophia Tol­staya in his first for­ay into fic­tion filmmaking.

Despite it being a mono­logue, there is indeed a cou­ple at the cen­tre of A Cou­ple. Half of it con­sists of Sophia Tol­staya (Nathalie Boute­feu), the sole onscreen pres­ence in the film’s tight 63 min­utes. The oth­er is Leo Tol­stoy, the great Russ­ian nov­el­ist who – despite com­fort­ably rest­ing on the bosom of pub­lic con­scious­ness for over a cen­tu­ry – is built here entire­ly out of Sophia’s words, direc­tor Fred­er­ick Wise­man con­cerned not so much with Leo the writer but with Leo the husband.

Wiseman’s first for­ay into fic­tion car­ries the director’s pen­chant for obser­va­tion. Stripped entire­ly of a score, A Cou­ple frames Sophia’s voice through the croak­ing of frogs, the tweet­ing of birds, and the rustling of leaves. The nat­ur­al rhythms of gar­dens and shores are made char­ac­ter, del­i­cate­ly jux­ta­posed against the words of a woman whose life was often made coad­ju­vant by the words of a man.

When Sophia describes the labo­ri­ous pat­terns of her rou­tine as a moth­er and wife, ants are brought to the screen, minus­cule crea­tures able to car­ry up to a thou­sand times their body weight. When the pas­sion shared between lovers inun­dates Sophia with wist­ful long­ing, Wise­man turns the cam­era to bloom­ing flow­ers. Sprawl­ing calla lilies stand for both the boun­ti­ful­ness of fer­til­i­ty and the aching sor­row of death (the Tol­stoys shared 13 chil­dren – four died before reach­ing adulthood).

Boute­feu and Wiseman’s first col­lab­o­ra­tion took place a decade ago with La Belle de Amherst, a play based on the let­ters and poems of yet anoth­er great lit­er­ary name, Emi­ly Dick­in­son. This inter­est shared by the duo in the per­son­al mus­ings of a pub­lic fig­ure brought them togeth­er once again for A Cou­ple, with Wise­man choos­ing the same mono­logue struc­ture employed in the play. While oth­er names were con­sid­ered, Sophia’s thor­ough cat­a­logu­ing – she kept a diary from the age of 18 until her death at 75 – set­tled the ques­tion of a cen­tral subject.

This access to such exten­sive archival mate­r­i­al feeds into the film’s com­pre­hen­sive grasp on the lifes­pan of a mar­riage, aid­ing Wise­man in trans­lat­ing the mal­adies of con­tem­po­rary con­ju­gal­i­ty through the par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence of one woman in the 19th cen­tu­ry. As Sophia grap­ples with the trou­bles that plagued her mar­i­tal bed, issues such as labour divi­sion, emo­tion­al detach­ment and finan­cial sep­a­ra­tion are care­ful­ly approached, the onesid­ed­ness of the account act­ing not as an imped­i­ment but as a tool of enlight­en­ment, the film apt­ly pre­oc­cu­pied in dis­sect­ing the role of a spouse in the suc­cess of great men.

If you look for per­fec­tion, you’ll nev­er be con­tent”, wrote Leo Tol­stoy in Anna Karen­i­na, one of literature’s great­est encap­su­la­tions of love and death. The two notions guide Wiseman’s poet­ic solil­o­quy, a film that treats with gen­er­ous empa­thy a woman who craved con­tent­ment from a man who chased perfection.

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