Un couple

Who could have guessed that Frederick Wiseman’s first fiction feature – a mesmerizing, meditative masterpiece made at age 92, only two months after the death of his wife of 66 years, Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (whose first name has served as the name of his production company) – would in some ways resemble some of the late works of Jean-Marie Straub? It’s an audiovisual fugue consisting of (a) a monologue performed by Nathalie Boutefeu, adapted by Boutefeu and Wiseman from diary entries and letters written by Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sophia about her estrangement from her husband and (b) the vibrant settings she wanders through, a lush seaside garden on the French island of Belle-Île off the coast of Brittany. It even features “the wind in the trees” that D.W. Griffith found missing from modern cinema, but which Straub has placed front and center in his own landscape art. But the differences from Straub are, of course, every bit as pertinent as the similarities: a devastating personal autocritique by a documentarist who has devoted his career to what he has called “reality fictions”, his ravishing widescreen compositions and the services of a skilled professional actress (whose credits include IRMA VEP and KINGS AND QUEENS).(Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Frederick Wiseman: TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), HIGH SCHOOL (1968), JUVENILE COURT (1973), PRIMATE (1974), WELFARE (1975), MEAT (1976), RACETRACK (1986), MISSILE (1988), CENTRAL PARK (1989), HIGH SCHOOL II (1994), ZOO (1994), BALLET (1995), PUBLIC HOUSING (1997), BELFAST, MAINE (1999), DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (2001), DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 2 (2002), STATE LEGISLATURE (2007), LA DANSE (2009), BOXING GYM (2010), CRAZY HORSE (2011), AT BERKELEY (2013), NATIONAL GALLERY (2014), IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (2015), EX LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (2017), MONROVIA, INDIANA (2018), CITY HALL (2020)