At just 64 minutes, this is a very modestly proportioned film from veteran documentary film-maker Frederick Wiseman, whose works generally run at epic length. And in fact A Couple is very different to his habitual output: it’s a belletristic homage to the most famously unhappy marriage in literary history; an intimate, pared-down chamber piece about Sofia Tolstoy, wife of Leo. The indefinite article in the title is misleading. This is the couple: a legendary relationship.
Sofia is played by Nathalie Boutefeu, who addresses the camera (and by that token Leo, or herself) in a series of yearning monologues which have been adapted from her diaries and letters. It is a thoroughly intelligent production, a film festival event that could not exist in the rough-and-tumble of regular movie distribution but will I hope find a home on streaming services.
With some licence, Wiseman imagines Sofia living by the sea, where she often sadly contemplates the crashing waves. (In fact, Yasnaya Polnaya, the Tolstoy estate where Sofia lived out her adult life, is 120 miles from Moscow and nowhere near the sea.) These little interludes – Sofia is also shown in meadows and by ponds – cleanse the palate between her arias of discontent, sadness, frustration, reproach and that certain kind of love that can never quite be extinguished but which is the source of all her unhappiness.
If only she didn’t love Tolstoy, if only this remarkable man did not (at least sometimes) love her, then she could leave him in good conscience and begin her life again. Instead, it is her destiny to stay with him. She is doomed to bear the burden of looking after the house and grounds, seeing to their many children, dealing with Tolstoy’s many guests and insufferable fan-worshipping admirers and acolytes, and of course, helping him with his work. (Apart from all her administrative and editorial help, Sofia copied out War and Peace in manuscript three times.) She was a fellow writer, which Tolstoy must surely have known was invaluable, but also made him neurotic about her as a kind of rival, something which went hand-in-hand with his jealousy.
Boutefeu captures all this in what might be called a platform performance on film: her own anger is being recalled in tranquillity, and it is not an angry performance as such. But she conveys Sofia’s legitimate grievances. Sofia is on her own up there on screen, which is how she probably felt in life, though the title always invites to imagine the other half of all this: the impossible, demanding bad husband. One can’t watch this without remembering the dramatic and bizarre ending to it all: Tolstoy fleeing, avowedly to get away from her (or from his own unhappiness and sexual torments) and dying in a railway station.
Sofia’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.
