Dissection of a Marriage

He says: "That's right, you're going to drive me to work when I want to go, goddammit, because that's what I want to do, when I want to do it."

She says: "The one thing I regret is this morning, when I told you that I loved you."

They slash at each other, not caring whether the cut is shallow or deep, but seeking only to wound. The dialogue comes equipped with quills. "You said something last night about having another baby," he says. "What's your position on that now?" Her reply is a don't-give-a-damn putdown: "Oh, I suppose just lying on my back." What gives this exchange its edge and makes the situation simultaneously forceful and intolerable, is the unmistakable air of reality.

Suburban Modern. The man and woman are the main figures--one is tempted to say antagonists--of a brutally frank documentary called A Married Couple. Made by Allan King, who was also responsible for the remarkable Warrendale, the film is an unblinking dissection of a modern family. Distilling some 70 hours of film into a crucial 97 minutes, King has fashioned a sad and sometimes horrifying document in which viewers can pay uneasy witness to the approaching annihilation of a human relationship.

The couple King chose for his cinema verite exegesis had been his friends for almost five years. Billy Edwards, 42 years old, is a Toronto adman who had just moved into a cushy suburban-modern house with his wife Antoinette, their infant son Bogart and the family dog, Merton. A cinematographer and a soundman, under King's direction, spent ten weeks in the Edwards' home, arriving before breakfast and not leaving until everyone had gone to bed. They filmed everything: meals and holidays, affection and indifference, disagreements and brawls. The result is a perfect model of documentary film making.

Because of the film's nature, criticism of A Married Couple cannot help sounding like psychoanalysis. To begin with, any couple that allows their marriage to be filmed and exposed in such a way is already approaching crisis. "I personally feel that it should be dealt with as drama," says King, "as a piece of fiction." But abstracting the situation in this manner removes not only some of its sting but much of its validity. It will be an almost irresistible temptation for audiences to align themselves with either husband or wife. Some will call Antoinette a selfish, shrill virago; others will see Billy as a frustrated personality whose need to control the relationship comes from his own insecurities.

Partisanship on either side is a trap. Many viewers will probably find themselves acting partly as referee and partly as analyst in a desperate match between two unattractive, unsympathetic but decidedly human beings. Most audiences will be astonished to learn that in real life, Billy and Antoinette remained together--and had another child. King shrewdly manipulates the film, juxtaposing episodes for editorial effect, as when he shows Antoinette asleep in her own bed, then cuts to Billy lying on his, nuzzling the dog. While King put A Married Couple together, his own marriage was breaking up, and it would be naive to believe that this did not influence his selection and arrangement of events. King maintains that Billy and Antoinette have "an average marriage," but the movie might better and more fairly be called One Particular Married Couple. In any case, the film can most accurately be appreciated as one man's documentary portrait of marriage, a deeply personal and therefore biased accomplishment in the growing art of the film essay.

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