PODCAST | Angelo Acerbi interviews Frederick Wiseman, director of the film Un couple.
Frederick Wiseman, a giant in documentary filmmaking, comes back for the second time in the fiction world with Un couple, an intense and moving monologue based on the diary of Sophia Tosltoj. Wiseman talks about the choice of the text, the curiosity and admiration for Tolstoj and the work withe actress Nathalie Boutefeu.
Un couple is a film about a long-term relationship between a man and a woman. The man is Leo Tolstoy. The woman is his wife, Sophia. They were married for 36 years, had 13 children nine of whom survived. Each kept a diary. Although they lived together, in the same house, they wrote letters frequently to each other. Leo Tolstoy insisted that they read their diaries aloud to guests at dinner parties. The Tolstoys were also a dysfunctional couple, arguing frequently and being very unhappy with each other while occasionally enjoying passionate moments of reconciliation. The film is Sophia’s monologue about the joys and struggles of their life together, loosely drawn from their letters to each other and their diary entries. The film was shot in a beautiful garden on Belle Île, an island off the coast of Brittany. The visible and subterranean life of the garden is also an important element in the story of Un couple.