A Couple

A COUPLE   ***

Frederick Wiseman

2022

IDEA:  In the wake of her husband's death, Sofia Tolstoy laments the patriarchal oppression she experienced during her marriage.

BLURB:  A Couple is an interesting experiment that becomes fascinating when considered in the context of Frederick Wiseman’s oeuvre. The film is almost the perfect inverse of the director’s typical, documentary film: instead of a bustling social setting, it takes place entirely in depopulated nature, and instead of observing a panoply of people it features just one. Wiseman’s documentaries capture the sprawling canvas of society through a rhizomatic accretion of details, but here, in lieu of its physical presence, society is depicted through the didactic direct-address of monologue. Ultimately, it’s structure that binds A Couple to Wiseman’s other work; in formal terms, through his characteristic alternation between static interstitial shots and human activity, and in thematic terms, through his exploration of the structure of an institution, in this case heterosexual marriage. The film suggests that it is only divorced from her geographical and cultural context - literally removed from the material confines of society - that Sophia Tolstoy or any other 19th-century wife could voice her grievances as a woman. Wiseman underscores the temporal dislocation by adapting Tolstoy’s words into an entirely different language, recited by another in what amounts to a theatrical reading. It’s this quality of ventriloquy and the social realities it betrays that, ironically, make A Couple feel quite like a documentary after all.

A Matter of Life and Death

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH   ****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

1946

IDEA:  Having miraculously survived after jumping from his burning plane during World War II, a British pilot conducts a romance with the radio operator he had communicated with before the incident while he simultaneously prepares to stand before a celestial court and defend his right to live.

BLURB:  Some films operate at such an audacious and formidable level - conceptually, thematically, aesthetically - that you can’t help but give yourself over to their astonishments. Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death is one such film. A quixotic, genre-mashing fantasia from an industry and an era not especially known for their formal daring, the film executes its loopy premise with a full-throated bravado and visual elegance that are, to risk cliché, heavenly. But A Matter of Life and Death is so confident in its approach and so ravishing in its design that it resists cliché, even as it openly courts it in Borzagian appeals to the transcendent power of love. Like that filmmaker-romantic, Powell and Pressburger exult in the possibilities of cinema to capture and expand the imagination. Their opulent, thoughtful use of Technicolor, courtesy of DP Jack Cardiff, remains nearly unmatched in sheer beauty, and their astute sense of how and when to employ practical effects - animation, motorized sets, puppetry - yields movie magic more potent than CGI. Such formal ingenuity serves a film that’s both a top-shelf work of fantasy and a distinctly postwar time capsule, and in ways that are inextricable. Portraying, wittily, a cosmic legal battle for one man’s right to life and love in the wake of World War II, A Matter of Life and Death fancifully recovers a human(ism) lost during the war and uses it to disarm the deadly follies of nationalism. Powell and Pressburger land their shots at both the British and Americans in keenly sarcastic ways; they know, having just won the war together, that the two are as close as Peter and June. Could the actual human romance at the center of the film be more convincing, and could June have been something more than a stock female love interest? Sure, but some films are so grand that their spells overwhelm, offering visions of life (and death?) that make other concerns finally feel so puny.

My Little Loves

MY LITTLE LOVES   **1/2

Jean Eustache

1974

IDEA:  Sent by his grandmother to live with his mother for a year in the city, the pubescent Daniel falls in with a crowd of older boys. 

BLURB:  My Little Loves is sort of an anti-coming-of-age film, in that its pubescent protagonist goes from a budding sociopath who rubs up against a girl at mass to, by the end of a languid two hours, a budding sociopath who smokes a cigarette and more unashamedly feels up a girl. Played by the gangly, wide-eyed yet impassive Martin Loeb, Daniel is at once an unassuming delinquent and a sullen cypher, like a more taciturn Antoine Doinel, or Laurent Chevalier from Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. Eustache’s austerely minimalist, deliberately stilted Bressonian style is an odd fit for material like this, sapping a portrait of childhood of its characteristic nervous energy and excitement, leaving instead a sense of glacial, almost monotonous drift. If the director’s intent was to convey the indeterminacy of this phase of growing up, he only partly succeeds, and more because of the hauntingly elliptical blackouts that punctuate most of his scenes than anything in the writing or the acting. Rather, the pleasures of My Little Loves are granular and sensory, largely attributable to the lush, limpid cinematography of Néstor Almendros, who spins visual poetry out of even the most meandering episodes of this curiously static quasi-bildungsroman.