Neuigkeiten

Zombie flicks are a unique kind of survivalist horror. They usually feature rotting flesh, chase scenes, headshots, and a lot of biting. Robin Campillos 2004 directorial debut, They Came Back (Les Revenants in French), refuses to humor these genre staples. This French film favors a slow-burn, psychological angle to scare its audience. They Came Back follows three families in a provincial French town after 13,000 dead people suddenly reappear over the course of two hours. The mayors wife, Martha (Catherine Samie), a couples six-year-old son, Sylvain (Saady Delas), and young widow Rachel's (Graldine Pailhas) husband, Mathieu (Jonathan Zacca), are the primary focuses of the film. A nationwide phenomenon, the town hesitantly releases the returned to their families and allows for reintegration into the workforce. Rather than cloaking the film in darkness, Campillo purposefully keeps most of his horror in the daylight. There, he forces the audience and the characters to confront the...

Veteran filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, now age 92, has worked for decades making critically loved, epic-length documentaries that often reach well beyond the two-, three- and four-hour mark. His subject matter is often institutional, the places of civic and political life: large government agencies (“City Hall”) and small towns, psychiatric hospitals (“Titicut Follies”) and burlesque clubs (“Crazy Horse”), libraries “(“Ex Libris”) and Neiman-Marcus (“The Store”).

So it might come as a surprise to learn that his latest, the intense, sorrowful “A Couple” is neither a documentary nor much longer than an hour.

“A Couple” stars French actress Nathalie Boutefeu as Sophia Tolstoy, a writer and the wife of legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, one half of literary history’s most infamously unhappy marriage. Tolstoy was her husband’s secretary and manuscript copyist, a diarist and the mother to their 13 children. Here Boutefeu (who co-wrote the screenplay with Wiseman) delivers a stunning solo...

For a filmmaker who’s trained his camera on institutions as disparate as mental asylums, public libraries, and university campuses, no subject seems to have exerted a more lasting fascination on Frederick Wiseman than the human face. A Couple, the nonagenarian’s latest, is no exception. Whatever else it may be, the film is first and foremost a portrait of a visage: Sophia Tolstoy’s. Played by Nathalie Boutefeu, she’s A Couple’s protagonist and sole performer, and Wiseman follows her as she swans into an Eden-like garden, pausing every so often to address her husband Leo, an invisible and mute presence standing somewhere behind the camera and haunting every frame. Less a conversation proper than a series of monologues, star-cum-co-writer Boutefeu recites excerpts she and Wiseman stitched together from Sophia’s diaries and the letters the eponymous couple exchanged through the years. Both engrossing and vitriolic, A Couple...

A Couple (2022).Few titles on my way to the Lido had me as intrigued as A Couple. Pre-premiere headlines had billed it 92-year-old Frederick Wiseman’s first foray into fiction. It isn’t. Ten years back, in The Last Letter (2002), the documentary maven followed Comédie Française’s icon Catherine Samie as she recited a missive from a chapter in Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (1980), an account of life in a Ukrainian ghetto fallen to the Nazis as told by a Jewish mother to her son. A Couple also pivots on another letter, this one read by Sophia Tolstoy to her husband, Leo. Wiseman, now with over forty documentaries to his name, has long cemented himself as the doyen of American cinéma vérité. His works—fly-on-the-wall excursions into American institutions and the people who orbit around them—have an almost reverential appreciation for faces, on which his camera focuses as they spill out words,...

Frederick Wiseman has been directing acclaimed documentaries for almost 60 years. His camera has tracked vast institutional forces as far-reaching as the mental hospital in 1967’s seminal “Titicut Follies” to more recent and equally intricate portraits of Jackson Heights, small-town Indiana, and the New York Public Library. With that record, it’s no surprise that when the Venice International Film Festival announced its 2022 lineup with Wiseman’s new film “A Couple” in competition, many assumed that it was another non-fiction project.

“That’s good,” Wiseman said in a recent phone interview with IndieWire from his home in Paris. He was eager to catch people off-guard. “You know that old bromide of Emerson, ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’? I don’t see why I need to be only categorized as a documentary filmmaker.”

Now he’s setting the record straight: “A Couple” is the rare Wiseman project that was entirely staged.