Two Strangers Try­ing Not to Kill Each Oth­er review – a por­trait of love and resilience

The open­ing shot of Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter’s debut fea­ture imme­di­ate­ly announces Two Strangers Try­ing Not to Kill Each Oth­er as a film of thought­ful com­po­si­tion. Bathed in warm light, the 84 year old pho­tog­ra­ph­er Joel Meyerowitz occu­pies the fore­ground, perched on the stairs of his rus­tic Tus­can home, his head lean­ing against the ban­nis­ter, while fur­ther in the dis­tance, on the home’s ground floor, we can see (and hear) Mag­gie Bar­rett play­ing a pen­sive melody on the piano. Over the fol­low­ing 90-odd min­utes, the direc­to­r­i­al duo, a young cou­ple them­selves, fix their gaze with admi­ra­tion on a cou­ple in their lat­er years as they ten­der­ly rumi­nate, with unfet­tered open­ness, on lov­ing and aging, on endurance and permanence.

Beyond a short, art­ful mon­tage in which Mag­gie and Joel nar­rate key details about their lives, this is a pic­ture that’s thor­ough­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with the present; a por­trait of a 35 year old rela­tion­ship in the now, espe­cial­ly against the chal­lenges the two must face when an acci­dent leaves Mag­gie bedrid­den with a bro­ken femur. Despite being near­ly a decade younger than her hus­band, it’s Joel that has to resort to prag­ma­tism as he self­less­ly waits on Mag­gie hand and foot along­side a busy sched­ule of exhi­bi­tion open­ings, book sign­ings and pub­lic talks. 

As Mag­gie recov­ers, first in their beau­ti­ful Tus­can home, and then at Joel’s swanky Man­hat­tan apart­ment, some­thing else is notice­ably chip­ping away at her. In fair­ness, as a self-pub­lished writer and visu­al artist in her mid-sev­en­ties who by now, is all too used to rejec­tion, it must be tough to be liv­ing in the shad­ow of a hus­band who’s not only much more accom­plished, but one of the most high­ly regard­ed artists of his gen­er­a­tion. His peaks have often coin­cid­ed with her troughs, and Maggie’s frus­tra­tions over unbal­anced pow­er dynam­ics slow­ly put the rela­tion­ship under pressure.

The film’s open­ing image, then, gains anoth­er dimen­sion of mean­ing, echo­ing the divide between its two sub­jects: a con­fi­dent pho­tog­ra­phy giant, a man of strik­ing phys­i­cal­i­ty and a gen­tle, calm demeanour in the fore­ground, and behind him a woman des­per­ate to be seen for her own dis­tinct sen­si­bil­i­ties, who has had to strug­gle for the things that came to her hus­band ever so eas­i­ly. With the cam­era most­ly con­fined to the inte­ri­ors of their two homes, we gain access to many ten­der and inti­mate moments, like shar­ing a bath in can­dle­light, yet the film’s more emo­tion­al­ly charged moments are sat­u­rat­ed with an air of self-impor­tance that bor­ders on irri­tat­ing per­for­mance, with out­breaks that are dif­fi­cult to empathise with, let alone relate to. 

Lack­ing the sort of atten­tive intu­ition that char­ac­teris­es Meyerowitz’s pho­tog­ra­phy, the film’s hyper-com­posed, stylised mode ends up estab­lish­ing an alien­at­ing gulf of dis­tance between us and the tit­u­lar ​“strangers”, whose socioe­co­nom­ic pow­er is far from uni­ver­sal. Still, the impact of the long, unedit­ed takes mak­ing up the film’s last few moments attest to a real sense of hon­esty and can­dour, lean­ing into com­plex ques­tions that lack straight­for­ward solutions.