Venice Movie Pageant 2022: A Couple, Bones and All, Grasp Gardener | Festivals & Awards

Therefore, after a tough bounce over the pond (extra chop on the flight than I usually like—my “like” proportion is none, however it was dangerous even by seasoned flyer requirements I’d reckon), I received right here on Friday and was capable of see a single movie, the brand new image by venerable documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who was in attendance for the premiere of “A Couple.” He’s 92, so I’ve no grounds for grievance about my journey, I reckon.

The climate right here is beautiful, by the way in which, heat and with a humidity degree that doesn’t fairly tilt into the uncomfortable. It’s nice sufficient that I’m penning this from the patio of my resort on the Lido, even though the mosquitoes are voluminous and ravenous and brazen and are consuming me alive after I’m not swatting them (one in every of them simply landed on one in every of my knuckles—who DOES that?).

This beautiful and stirring image is a late-career curveball from Wiseman. First off, it’s solely an hour and alter in size—Wiseman’s immersive documentaries, examinations of energy hierarchies in quite a lot of totally different life settings, typically hit the 200-minute mark. Second, it’s not a documentary, regardless of all of the spoken phrases in it originating from actual individuals. Third, title however, just one individual seems on display.

Wiseman wrote the movie (which is in French) with the protean French actress Nathalie Boutefeu, who right here performs Sophia Tolstoy, the spouse of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. The movie’s monologue, similar to it’s, was drawn from her diary and her letters, and from Leo’s letters to her.

Wearing a easy outfit suggestive of the flip of the 19^th century to the 20^th, full with a scarf that has a floral design that corresponds to the gardens she typically walks by way of, Boutefeu’s Sophia speaks to her husband with tenderness and longing at first. She typically speaks on to the digital camera, typically to the ocean, or the gap. Her tenderness turns to indignation, then anger. A lady of no inconsiderable expertise for writing, she is dropped into the place of The Nice Man’s Spouse (in truth she was Leo’s copyist for Battle and Peace; take into account the potential for irritation there) and calls him out not simply on that account however on account of him exhibiting extra consideration for his serfs than for her. “The poet burns and consumes others,” she says, and he or she’s not unsuitable. And finally she comes again round to tenderness and longing. The movie is a remarkably concentrated work. Elegant, swish, purposefully bristling.