‘Un Couple’ a portrait of the wrenching Tolstoy marriage
Frederick Wiseman is renowned for making massive, fly-on-the-wall style documentaries (“High School,” “Welfare”), but every decade or two he makes a regular narrative feature, and those tend to be like “Un Couple,” set to screen at the Roxie Theater from Friday, Nov. 25 to Wednesday, Nov. 30.
It’s a brief movie — 63 minutes in length — and follows a single character, Sophia Tolstoy (Nathalie Boutefeu), as she agonizes over a letter to her husband, the great novelist Leo Tolstoy. The film, which is in French with English subtitles, plays almost like a parody of a ponderous foreign film, but the brevity helps, and if you get onto the movie’s wavelength, you will appreciate its dissection of a difficult marriage.
Leo had his good points (“War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina”), but he was not going to win any awards as a husband.