Venice Review: Frederick Wiseman’s ‘Un Couple’

deadline.com:

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.The lost soul in his Venice Competition film is Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sophia, played by French actress Nathalie Boutefeu reading a text assembled from various letters between her and her famous literary husband.

Aside from Sophia’s hairstyle and dress, there aren’t really any clues to period, and the decision to shoot in a random area of natural beauty (actually an island off the coast of Brittany) saves an awful lot of location and props.

What we’re left with, however, is an almost painfully austere production that makes previous depictions of creative women — Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, his tribute to poet Emily Dickinson, or Wash Westmoreland’s Colette — look like The Ziegfeld Follies.Written and performed in French, hence the title, it consists entirely of Boutefeu baring Sophia’s soul directly to the camera, revealing how, at the age of 18, she was humbled to be the bride of such a great and worldly man, only to realize that his insecurities more than matched his talents.