‘A Couple’ Review: Frederick Wiseman Turns to Narrative Filmmaking — Kind Of — In This Short, Literate Curio

This is so harsh!

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered by the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Friendships can be as changeable and temperamental and outright dramatic as grand romances, though they tend to get a bland rap on screen — with friends, for most screenwriters, merely convenient constants, there to support protagonists through matters of supposedly more consequence. If substantial platonic relationship studies are rare, ones about men are rarer still. And if that comes down to a social convention rather than a cinematic one, that’s integral to the power and poignancy of Martin McDonagh’s searing “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a film that traces the tortured breakup between two best pals in remote rural Ireland with all the anguish and gravity of the most charged romantic melodrama — its high, unleashed emotions all the more startling in a world where men don’t speak their feelings.

A councillor is to act as "peacemaker" in a row between residents over a neighbour's scheme to convert a large detached house into five apartments. The plan to turn the house at the end of cul-de-sac on Marston Road in the Broughton Park area of Salford has been given the go-ahead by councillors on the city's planning and transportation regulatory panel.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first feature film in 11 years, and only his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, best known to international audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has never been one for unconsidered or impersonal projects. At first glance, then, one might wonder what drew him out of hibernation for a film that, with its trim runtime and small-scale domestic narrative, belies a title that translates as “immensity.” This 1970s-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender identity while his mother battles mental health demons is too palpably pained and heartfelt to be called slight, but it’s sensitive and peculiar in ways that feel fragile — occasionally splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Rather like the arc of the moral universe, “Argentina, 1985” is long, but bends toward justice. Effectively dramatizing the country’s landmark Trial of the Juntas, history’s first instance of a civilian justice system convicting a military dictatorship, Santiago Mitre’s broad, sprawling, heart-on-sleeve courtroom saga may draw from the same nightmarish period of history that has informed much of Argentine cinema’s most essential, haunting works — from 1985’s Oscar-winning “The Official Story” to last year’s “Azor” — but eschews any subtle arthouse stylings for a storytelling sensibility as robustly populist as anything by Sorkin or Spielberg. Small wonder, then, that Amazon Studios has boarded a film clearly aiming to be both a domestic smash and an international crossover hit — buoyed by the reliable star power of Ricardo Darín, his signature suaveness tempered by a walrus mustache and boxy ‘80s frames as Julio Strassera, the dogged prosecutor who took on this charged, against-the-odds case. Though a warmly received premiere in competition at Venice will set it on the right path, “Argentina, 1985” is, appropriately enough, a people’s film about people’s justice, balancing tear-jerking historical catharsis with touches of droll domestic comedy, and set to draw crowds on enthusiastic word of mouth.

“Photography was always a way to walk through fear,” says Nan Goldin in her raspy voice as photos fill the screen. Nuzzled within the textures of the snapshots live friends, lovers, and drifters, all eternally preserved through the eyes of the consecrated artist who rose to prominence in the 80s thanks to her visual chronicling of queer life and culture in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The scourge of the opioid crisis has been documented in the press and in government reports; the culpability of the Sacklers, the multi-billionaire pharmaceutical family whose former company Purdue made the painkiller Oxycontin, has been successfully dramatized. The Sacklers are everywhere in Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they are supporting players.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Frederick Wiseman, a voracious reader, doesn’t watch television. In fact, he’d never really gotten through a whole series until recently, when he watched HBO’s “The Wire.” “I don’t know why, but it was interesting,” he tells Variety drily. Every couple of years, the 92-year-old master documentarian behind such seminal films as “Titicut Follies” and “Juvenile Court” has churned out a sprawling documentary fixated on a microcosm of society or some sort of social issue, but when the pandemic paused those efforts for two and a half years, it’s Wiseman’s literary proclivities that drew him to Sofia Tolstoy’s writing for his new fiction film “Un Couple,” which premiered Friday in Venice’s Competition section.

While watching Frederick Wiseman’s “Un Couple” — the legendary documentarian’s first fictional drama— a different literary giant comes to mind besides the ones whose mercurial marriage is depicted on screen. The film’s fickle love recalls a verse from Latin poet Catullus, undoubtedly familiar to anyone who studied the language in school: “what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.” The woman in question in “Un Couple” is Sophia Tolstoy, wife of legendary Russian novelist Leo, as embodied in the film by French actress Nathalie Boutefeu.

There are two clear themes that have emerged by now at this year’s Venice film festival: one is the concept of the lost soul (Bardo, White Noise) and the other is the sometimes perilous consequence of letting big-name directors cut loose on their dream projects (also White Noise, Bardo). At 92, Frederick Wiseman has earned the right to do whatever he wants, but anyone getting over-excited about the prospect of this, his fiction debut, ought to know that Un Couple a) isn’t strictly fiction at all, and b) is very much of a piece with his famously unhurried longform documentaries.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “The lessons of the fire, as we reach for something higher,” a voice wails as images of flying crows and blood dripping down a rose’s thorny stem flood the screen. “With eyes we’ve all come to know, he’s the devil in Ohio.”  This theme song has a self-conscious ludicrousness that’s ultimately earned by the series it introduces — at least in one sense. Netflix’s “Devil in Ohio” isn’t so great that its missteps end up making sense, but it’s so schlockily unembarrassed by its excesses and its shortcomings alike that it feels difficult to critique.  Here, Emily Deschanel plays Suzanne, a psychiatrist whose particularly challenging new patient Mae (Madeleine Arthur) seems in urgent need of shelter after escaping a cult. Naturally, Suzanne brings her home — and, of course, Suzanne has three daughters (played by Xaria Dotson, Alisha Newton, and Naomi Tan) from whom Mae can be acclimated into high-school life, or on whom Mae can rapidly exert her influence.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Just before director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Oppenheimer” plants a fixed image of Ted Hall in the popular imagination, along comes Steve James’s sensitive, studious documentary “A Compassionate Spy” to preemptively set any records straight. Unpacking the life and work of the prodigious teenage Manhattan Project physicist who passed key information about the endeavor to the Soviet Union — cuing an adulthood dogged by suspicion and secrecy — the film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling. If the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’s best work, with its flourishes limited to some unnecessary dramatized passages, that should be no impediment to “A Compassionate Spy” commanding a sizable audience on multiple platforms. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic The political activism of pop stars is, as a rule, on the restrained side. Those who make their allegiances clear still tend to keep all factions in their fanbases sweet by limiting divisive rhetoric, or filtering their politics through broadly palatable humanitarian causes; those who speak a little more frankly still risk the wrath of the public, the internet and their record labels alike. Yet for Ugandan singer Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu — better known to his adoring fans as Bobi Wine — there’s both everything and nothing to lose by getting a little more directly involved in national politics than most such celebrities would dare. Entering a presidential election against corrupt, long-ruling incumbent Yoweri Museveni is, he knows, both a folly and a necessary symbolic stand — a certain path to honorable defeat that “Bobi Wine: Ghetto President” documents with angry urgency and bitter gallows humor.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Gigi & Nate” begins with two leaps. The first is out of terror, when Gigi, a capuchin monkey at a sad-sack roadside petting zoo, tries to steer clear of her “caretaker.” The second is the sweet leap of boy-joy that 17-year-old Nate Gibson takes off a rocky ledge and into a pond. In this amiable, if unnecessarily manipulative, movie about the human-animal bond — as well as the different forms resilience can take — that fateful second leap will lead the young man and the monkey to each other.Gigi is rescued by a woman who works for an organization that provides service animals to people with disabilities.

Caroline Framke Chief TV Critic For any adult still avoiding animation out of some stubborn refusal to understand its advantages as a both visual and storytelling medium, “Pantheon” makes its ambitions known from the get-go. After the eerie opening theme, scoring a fluorescent string of code smashing through a Greek statue, the show cuts to a high-school classroom, where a blunt voiceover lays the stakes bare. “Most of the girls in my class completely missed the moment when the world began to end,” teen outcast Maddie Kim (Katie Chang) tells us, the laptops blinking in unison as if in agreement. It’s a fittingly arresting start to this unnerving series, which taps an all-star cast to meld micro character work with macro questions about technology that may never have a satisfying answer.

Ben Croll As Unifrance’s Daniela Elstner sees it, the wealth of talent in this year’s Venice slate imparts a good bill of health for the French industry writ large. “Today, festival directors look to France in a slightly different way,” Elstner says. “We can find eminences like Frederick Wiseman alongside [emerging talents] like Alice Diop. That’s the strength of a good selection: You need names, you need surprises, you need to mix it up.” Alongside Diop and Wiseman (whose “A Couple” is in French, if not a majority French production), this year’s Venice roster also includes “Other People’s Children” from Rebecca Zlotowski and “Our Ties” from Roschdy Zem — together forming a delegation perhaps more notable for the fact that none had competed in Venice before than for the almost incidental gender parity of the mix.

Right at the beginning of The March On Rome, a special screening in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, Mark Cousins draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that cinema is most powerful weapon of all. It isn’t clear — to me, anyway — whether that joyful proclamation dates back to 1922, when Benito Mussolini led a Fascist march from Naples to Rome, or to some other eruption of historical optimism. Cinema isn’t as powerful as all that — if it were, Fascism would have been clobbered to a pulp by Chaplin, Lubitsch and all the other filmmakers who lampooned its vainglorious leaders. But images do matter. They certainly mattered to Italian Fascism.