THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Strange object that this film, A couple, which, for the regulars of the cinema of Frederick Wiseman, will not fail to disorient. First the duration, exactly one hour and three minutes, very far from the temporal monumentality of his last documentaries: City Hall (four hours and thirty-two minutes), Monrovia, Indiana (two hours and twenty-three minutes), bookplate (three hours and eighteen minutes). And then, A couple is not a documentary, nor a fiction for that matter, but a kind of experimental object, solo for an actress, Nathalie Boutefeu, planted in the middle of the wild island of Belle-Ile, playing the passionate letters of Sophia Tolstoy addressed to her husband Léon: thirty-six years of marriage and thirteen children. Wiseman had already attempted the exercise in 2002 in The Last Letter, with Catherine Samie and life and destiny, by Vasily Grossman.
We guess that this object was born of a great friendship between Wiseman and Nathalie Boutefeu, whose first collaboration took place at the Lucernaire, during a play drawing on the letters of Emily Dickinson. That being said, the disarray remains complete: it consists in seeing one of the greatest filmmakers and documentary filmmakers try his hand at a form so far removed from his usual grammar, immovable, creator of a work where the testimony facing the camera and the gaze towards the objective are the two great taboos, nature the great absentee. Everything he has never done, he does here.
“Author Policy”
For an hour, we run after the possibility of grafting A couple to the body of Wisemanian work. The film has the trappings of a Sunday film, a film of friendship, for two and for two, which one enters as an intruder, and which obviously makes one think of the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, filmmakers of text and nature made indistinguishable, but without achieving the same vertigo or the same precision.
For the spectator who keeps faith in a “politics of authors” (coherence of the work, staging as signature), this film makes it absolutely inoperative. Here, the filmmaker turns out to be untraceable, untraceable, and this is perhaps the subject ofA couple : the evaporation of the male figure, of the author – Wiseman and Leo Tolstoy –, to the benefit of women, one eclipsed by the story and the work of the husband, the other actress, the only human presence struggling with a nature (sky, earth, garden, sea) which – we understand – is the metaphor of the devouring ego of the artist. In its oddity, A couple this would perhaps be the reaffirmation of a gesture, yet another manifesto for those who have not understood the Wiseman way: the spectacle of the author’s disappearance, his reaffirmed vow of silence.
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