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.