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 (“Belfast, Maine”), 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 (64 minutes, to be precise).
“A Couple” stars French actress Nathalie Boutefeu (“Irma Vep,” “The Butterfly’s Dream”) as Sophia Tolstoy, a writer and the wife of legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, one half of literary history’s most infamously unhappy marriage.