Wiseman, best known for his documentaries, offers the Venice competition a rare scripted work with Nathalie Boutefeu playing Sophia Tolstoy.
is also one of only two films Wiseman has directed that consists almost entirely of an actor playing a role, the other beinga filmed record of a stage play he directed in Paris that was adapted from the Holocaust-themed novel by Vasiliy Grossman.
Dressed in simple long, black period clothes with a Russian-style floral shawl draped over her shoulders at times , she is first seen in a small room, writing on a sheet of parchment with an old-fashioned black crayon, underscoring the epistolary origins of the material. Mostly her gaze rests off to the side in an unfocussed way, as if Sophia were talking to herself, which makes the moments when she looks straight at the camera with piercing pale eyes all the more striking.
This scene and another set in an interior bookend the film. The rest mostly observes Boutefeu’s Sophia walking, talking and sometimes sitting reflectively in tranquil places in Jardin La Boulaye, a private garden on Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island off the coast of Brittany. There are also shots of waves surging around the rocky cliffs and crags of a beach which look remarkably like the beach seen in Celine Sciamma’s.
Wiseman and DP John Davey give the macro lenses a workout with abundant close-ups of blossoms, including lushly speckled rhododendrons, tumbling cascades of fleabane, gaudy gorse in such profusion you can practically smell it wafting off the screen. The sensuality of the floral imagery, coupled with Sophia’s circumlocutory description of her marriage’s intense flares of passion represents a reminder that flowers are basically plants’ sex organs.
Sophia quotes letters from Leo where he talks of how the fictional worlds he lives in are more real to him than the one he actually lives in with her, which galls her even if she’s too meek and battered down by his patriarchal bullying. Were this a story about a contemporary couple, many audience members would be rooting for her to leave him, but of course that was an almost unthinkable choice in the time Sophia was living.
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