by Anthony Frajman
For six decades, revered filmmaker Frederick Wiseman gained renown for his non-fiction films, which examine major institutions, and the lives within them.
One of the most respected and important living filmmakers, his seminal 1967 debut Titicut Follies looked at the patients in a Massachusetts Hospital for the criminally insane and their treatment.
His 2013 film At Berkeley probed one of the most respected universities in America, from its classrooms to boardrooms.
National Gallery (2014) examined the day-to-day operations of the titular, storied British museum.
Yet after six decades, at 92, Wiseman decided to pivot to fiction films, adapting Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries and letters for his latest film, A Couple.
A Couple is only Wiseman’s third fiction effort and his first in 20 years, following the acclaimed Seraphita’s Diary (1982), which examined the struggles of a fashion model, and The Last Letter (2002), starring celebrated French actor Catherine Samie.
After six decades of focusing almost exclusively on documentaries, Wiseman says that he found working in fiction again liberating.
“I liked it a lot,” he says. “In my other films, I create a world by showing lots of people. And in this film, I create a world by just showing one person.”
Wiseman’s rare foray into fiction began when friend and collaborator and veteran French actor, Nathalie Boutefeu, approached him with a copy of Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries, suggesting he read them.
The two had worked together previously on a production of the Emily Dickinson play The Belle of Amherst. After agreeing to team together on adapting the diaries and Leo Tolstoy’s letters into a film, Wiseman and Boutefeu began working on the film together over a year.
“We read all of Sophia’s notebooks, which were about a thousand pages, and we read all of Tolstoy’s letters, and we made initial selection,” Wiseman says.
A Couple is told from Sophia Tolstoy’s perspective. It is her struggles which are the focus of the film, not those of Leo Tolstoy. As the film depicts, Sophia Tolstoy’s desires often came secondary to her famed husband and his literary career.
While Sophia was burdened with raising and feeding their thirteen children, menial household duties, and assisting him with administrative tasks and acting as his editor, her wants and own literary ambitions took a backseat.
Wiseman, together with Boutefeu, saw a huge relevance in the issues inherent in Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries and in the Tolstoy marriage, which raised questions around the institution of marriage itself, and roles within marriage.
“I thought the problems the Tolstoys had were very contemporary,” Wiseman says.
The director says one of the highlights of making A Couple, was collaborating with Boutefeu as an actor, and being able to guide her performance, as opposed to his documentary subjects, where he watches and observes what happens, but doesn’t interject.
“She’s a very good actress. I also made lots of suggestions to her. And we rehearsed the scenes, just before they were shot.”
As opposed to the filmmaker’s recent non-fiction output, which often spans three to four hours (his 2017 documentary Ex Libris: The New York Public Library was 197 minutes, his 40th documentary In Jackson Heights (2015) was 190), A Couple stands at a tight 63 minutes. It didn’t start out that way.
“(The original version of A Couple) would’ve been filmed for about four hours, and then we reduced it to the material you see in the final film,” he says.
One of the biggest challenges for Wiseman: changing his established filmmaking style, which has remained the same over decades. Wiseman’s shooting ratio on A Couple was a fraction of his normal output on his non-fiction works.
“The shooting ratio was only about four or five to one; in a documentary it’s 30 or 40 to one,” he says.
“In a documentary, you don’t get a chance to re-shoot the same thing. You only get a chance to do it once. Here, the same scene could be shot from different angles, sometimes I wanted to re-shoot the performance. It’s not at all done the same way a documentary is done in terms of shooting,” he adds.
“In a movie like this, you can shoot a scene as many times as you want, and in as many angles as you want. And that was necessary, and it was certainly enjoyable,” Wiseman continues.
Unlike so many productions, the filmmaker was able to avoid the issue of lockdowns or facing being shut down, as the film was shot in virtual isolation with a reduced crew in the renowned La Boulaye garden in Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany.
“I did the movie in the midst of the pandemic, but there was very little Covid on the island where I shot the film, so it couldn’t interfere with the shooting. Nobody had to wear masks. But I couldn’t help but be aware of the Covid in the spring of 2021,” he recalls.
With A Couple released to acclaim, the prolific filmmaker has another documentary already in the can, the gastronomic Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, which goes behind the scenes of a renowned, family-owned three Michelin-starred French restaurant, which premieres in Venice. Yet, Wiseman is already thinking about next projects.
The venerable filmmaker, who has turned 93, says he hopes to continue making fiction films as well as non-fiction, and that A Couple shows a side of him that audiences may not have seen. “I hope it shows that I can make film in a different style,” he says.