Wiseman’s three films - Seraphita’s Diary, The Last Letter, Un Couple - are his only fictional works so far. It’s tempting to give them short shrift and as works bearing little relationship to the rest of his massive body of work. I’m not able to make the case for their essential relationship, but I think three films by Wiseman shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, and the three together do raise some interesting questions and perhaps also afford us some cinematic pleasures.
The similarities between the three are strong, starting with the rather obvious focus of each on the performance of a single actress. They are dramatic monologues, mostly spoken directly to the camera, and the actresses have some things in common. Appolonia von Ravenstein of Seraphita’s Diary and Catherine Samie of The Last Letter both appeared in previous Wiseman films. Von Ravenstein is much in evidence in Model, perhaps most memorably as the leg model of the thirty second commercial which we see created in minute detail. She is the only one of the three who is not a professional actress, though she did appear in a couple of films after this one. Samie is a major figure in La Comédie-Française, particularly touching in the visit to the old actors’ home near the end of the film where she makes the presentation to the elder actress. Nathalie Boutefeu of Un Couple is not in a previous Wiseman film, but she has appeared in over forty films and is the writer of this one. Obviously too, only Seraphita is in English, while the other two are in French. And all three are ostensibly readings of written works - a diary, a letter, and in the third case a kind of combination, as the credits say: “loosely based on the diaries of Sophia Tolstoy and letters from Leo to Sophia Tolstoy.” All three have parts with limited speaking and usually instead a concentration upon its actress-star, sometimes with a bit of additional visual experimentation to go along with it. Seraphita is the most experimental in this regard, with dance sequences and experimental montages, while Last Letter leans heavily on black-and-white expressionist lighting, and Un Couple is given to shots of nature. Still, spoken speech with the camera focused upon its actress is the principal mode of all three. (The Last Letter was also directed by Wiseman as a stage performance prior to the making of the film.)
Films of dramatic monologues are not a major genre, but there are some others. I’m not just thinking of films with mainly a single performer, as there are a good number of those (Tom Hanks in Cast Away, Sandra Bullock in Gravity, etc.) but films which are essentially one actor speaking, almost as if on stage. One hardy perrenial has been Jean Cocteau’s Voix Humaine, or The Human Voice, which has been done by actresses no less than Anna Magnani (directed by Roberto Rosselini), Ingrid Bergman, and as recently as 2020 by Tilda Swinton (directed by Pedro Almodóvar). Un Couple is perhaps not far from these, as in Cocteau’s work, the actress is on the phone with an unseen and unheard former lover, and in Un Couple, the woman is writing letters to her always unseen husband, as we shall discuss. This kind of film obviously lives and dies on the performance of the actress, and we have to acknowledge that single character performances are not necessarily to everyone’s taste. They also place special demands upon directors, as one would expect at least some visual interest likely needs to accompany what the actress delivers.
Let’s add what I think has to have been at least a part of Wiseman’s interest in this kind of film, though I’ve never seen anyone mention it. Wiseman got his start as a film-maker as the producer of Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World in 1963, four years before he made his own first film, Titicut Follies. So I’d say it’s fairly certain he’s seen her 1967 film Portrait of Jason, a film of some actual renown, including selection to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. (I’ve already mentioned that those other two, Cool World and Titicut Follies, have also been accorded that recognition.) Shot during a twelve hour period in Clarke’s Chelsea Hotel apartment (beginning on a Saturday evening and extending through the night), the film’s sole visible performer is the title character, a would be actor and very voluble person. While he gets into some off screen arguments and responds to some questions, the film is very much his performance for the camera. Unlike Wiseman’s three films, this is a real person and not a fictional character, but that baring your soul for the camera quality is very much there. While Jason doesn’t need much prompting, Clarke does coax him in interview fashion, something that Wiseman has never done, but that style of a camera on a single person had to have had some effect upon him.
We get close to interviews in some parts of Seraphita’s Diary, when Appolonia also plays an interviewer, as we cut between her two roles as questioner and subject. We could also see some overlap in these three films with the occasional monologues in Wiseman’s other films, like the memorable recitation about waiting for Godot at the end of Welfare, though a five minute recitation is a far cry from a film devoted exclusively to a single actress speaking. Wiseman could have presumably done something similar, allowing a real person to speak at some length, but throughout his career he has been so rigorously against interviewing or coaxing behavior from those he’s filmed, that a film from him closer to Portrait of Jason is difficult to imagine. Instead, and especially with Un Couple, he takes actual written materials speaking to real events in the lives of this famous married couple, and avoids the appearance of interviews in this manner.
Particularly with this film, it merits at least a second viewing, because the first time doesn’t get us much past probably an appreciation of the performance and perhaps some pleasure in the many shots of nature on this small island of Belle Isle, off the coast of Brittany. There’s actually a good deal going on visually that’s probably too easy to look past the first time around. Appreciating the narrative complexity and visual strategies can certainly make us respect the film, even if it can still feel like a tough go.
In Un Couple, Madame Tolstoy in her letters speaks in response to things her unseen husband has done or said, so in effect she is supplying answers to an offscreen presence, and is entirely and directly addressing him throughout the film. (Clarke, in her film, also chose to remain unseen.) I’d call it a bold step in Un Couple to only have us see the wife. I guess we could imagine a film that cut to an actor playing Leo Tolstoy when his letters are read, rather than having Sophie being the only half of the married couple that we see, though she both reads letters of her own and also speaks things written to her in letters by him. There’s an admirable purity in all three of these diary and letter films in Wiseman’s concentration on his actresses, even if that restricts the possibilities of dramatic interplay. It’s the challenge of focusing upon these singular performances that becomes the raison d’etre in each case. It’s a challenge he’s long held to, as the three films are twenty years each apart (that is, 1982, 2002, and 2022).
We could almost say Un Couple isn’t a monolog at all, even though we only hear the one actress speak in the entire film. The film is resolutely her addressing her husband through her letters, but the only times we see her actually writing are in the only two interior scenes, one at the beginning and one at the end, and for most of the time she speaks those letters out loud. She even occasionally quotes by memory from his diaries, which adds to the feeling she’s in dialog with him. It’s important though that we always see her speaking, rather than ever getting voice-over as if listening in to her thoughts, and sometimes she speaks directly to the camera. The effect of her speaking is strong, and having an unseen male voice in dialog with her would have been a huge mistake. Un Couple gives serious respect to the idea of the monologue, and doesn’t waiver from that.
Un Couple may well depend upon the unseen husband being so renowned and well known a figure. As a result, we certainly understand that Sophia has lived her life in his shadow, as she points out a number of times. It’s hard to imagine any larger a shadow. And despite the beautiful background, the film certainly presents quite a dim view of marriage, to the point where there’s a jarring disconnect between the shots of nature and the bleak outlook her diary entries present. When you actually pay attention to what she says, the unseen half of the couple doesn’t come across as much of a husband. “For you, I’m nothing but a mangy dog” is perhaps my favorite line of her recriminations, but there are loads of others. Wiseman still shows a penchant for abrupt end of scene lines, and another good one is “You show very little kindness to us, your family”. The silence and return to nature that accompanies these plaints are a regular device in the film which does have some throwback to the editing style of the documentaries. For two more instances of this, each of these ends a scene. “One cannot hold someone by force.” “Most men live most of their lives as if in front of a mirror.” It’s a pretty relentless critique, increasing in severity as it goes along. The title is ironic not only because we only see one half of the couple, but because they don’t sound like much of a couple at all.
This might be the point then to note that marriage has been a large concern in some of the documentaries too, most notably the two Domestic Violence films. Marriage clearly doesn’t come across at all well there, so Un Couple extends those critiques into the rarefied realm of literary celebrity and also back in time. We also had marriage counseling in Canal Zone, and a bunch of his films are in locations of marital separation, the military films obviously, like Basic Training, Manoeuvre, Missile, and Sinai Field Mission. The only film that presents any view of happy marriages at all is Near Death, and there too, we only get one member of the couple speaking while the other lies silently dying. In some of the location films (Belfast, Maine; In Jackson Heights; Monrovia, Indiana) there are scarcely any happily married couples at all. We’re more likely to see the elderly perhaps speaking of a dead partner, or an actual funeral itself. So maybe Un Couple is less of an anomaly for Wiseman than it might first appear.
Clearly a point of interest here is the film’s setting in nature - flowers and trees, ocean waves and rocky promintories, bees and birds - these all get a great deal of visual attention. A regular visual strategy is to start on a shot of nature into which Sophia enters, and she will also regularly exit and leave us again in a natural setting. These are made more pronounced by these compositions being widescreen, so there’s lots of space for her to cross. Wiseman also uses nature for transitional shots, bridges between her monologues, but they’re not simply transitions, because there are too many and also the beauty of location keeps them from being just that. The setting frequently dominates, to where Sophia is a figure within a world, not just a character whose performance is being focused upon. At times, the turbulence of waves and winds whipping through trees are reflective of her mentail state, but there isn’t a regular strategy in this regard, Instead, as he has fairly often in his documentaries, when he’s in exterior locations, he (and his frequent cinematographer John Davey) are interested in them in their own right. I’d think of the fields in Monrovia or the opening ranch shots in Meat as just a couple of examples of attending to outside spaces, seemingly unusual for a film-maker so often in urban environments. Un Couple is Davey’s opportunity especially to give free rein to visual splendor. It’s their only film where the camera is sometimes mounted on a tripod, and it’s usually to marvel at a creature in nature or a beautiful landscape. Perhaps these are a counterpoint to Sophia’s grim tales of her marriage, but they’re a beautiful counterpoint in and of themselves.
There have been occasional accounts of Wiseman flirting at a distance with Hollywood feature film making, and of his having written some scripts. What’s clear with these films is that he’s not doing calling card fiction films - indie style conventional dramatic works that suggest he should move on to a more ambitious fictional scale. In that way, these seem very much of a piece with Wiseman’s non-fictional work: uncompromising, rigorous, and little concerned with how initially palatable the work might be to an audience. You take Wiseman on his own terms. He isn’t coming very far to you, and he has no problem whatever in expecting his viewers to be prepared for challenging work.