Venice 2022: Un couple
VENICEUn couple. One couple, as in every couple. But also one very specific couple: Leo and Sophia Tolstoy. Told entirely through one broken-up monologue by French actress Nathalie Boutefeu, this film takes the letters that the two spouses wrote to each other during their unhappy marriage and freely readapts them to showcase the pain of Sophia’s life as a housewife.
On paper, this is the type of movie that would rarely get much attention from press and festival attendees. However, Un couple will go down in history for being the first fiction film by legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman: at the tender age of 92, he still releases a new movie every couple of years, and he took advantage of the lockdown to experiment and reinvent himself.
At first glance, there seems to be very little of Wiseman in Un couple, but the more one digs into its aesthetic, the more it becomes clear that it is undoubtedly made by him: the long, static, wide shots of Boutefeu walking and talking through the La Boulaye Garden are intercut with shorter close-ups of the nature surrounding her. These contextual images of either a pond, the beach, spiders’ nests, and fallen trees are close cousins to the establishing shots of the various locations of the New York Library in Ex Libris or the various office buildings in City Hall.
Is Un couple excessively theatrical? Absolutely, as it is hard to shake off the fact that, no matter how earnest and passionate and lived in Boutefeu’s performance is, it is not enough for her to carry the movie on her shoulders, despite its short runtime of 64 minutes. What lingers more in the mind is how taking something as specific as the letters that Sophia Tolstoy sent to Leo works in the proto-feminist world we live in. Un couple is a feminist text through and through, and while it is undoubtedly slow to the point of boredom for many, it is a stark reminder that, sadly, topics like women’s rights and abuse from the patriarchy will never go away easily.