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A Couple

Directed by Frederick Wiseman

2022

France, USA

63 minutes

All Ages

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A rare narrative work from legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman explores the fractious relationship between the literary couple Leo and Sophia Tolstoy.

The Tolstoys were married for 36 years, had 13 children and each kept a diary, alongside constant correspondence with each other through letters – all while living in the same house. Wiseman, the great chronicler of institutions, here looks unflinchingly at the institution of marriage. Through a searing monologue, drawn from the diaries and letters of the Tolstoys, Sophia (played brilliantly by Nathalie Boutefeu) describes a tumultuous marriage to the mercurial War and Peace author – one of great sadness and intense passion. Shot on the beautiful, flower-filled Belle Île, an island off the coast of Brittany, the mesmerising A Couple shows that the 93-year-old maestro (the subject of SFF's 2022 retrospective) still has something exceptional up his sleeve.

Wiseman has spent a career probing the complex inner workings and painfully human errors of America’s establishments, but in marriage itself, he may have found the most fraught, mysterious and unreformable institution of all.

Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Sophia’s measured monologues are the calm before the storm, but also the calm instead of the storm: a kind of working-through and pacification of emotional agony. A valuable and insightful pen-portrait.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

A Couple upends expectations of his work in what feels an almost mirthfully perverse number of ways.

Guy Lodge, Variety