Original subtitles

A COUPLE

Based on the works of Sophia Tolstoy

The first thing I feel like doing

today,

is to write to you, Leo.

I wish to recall the day

that bound us for the many years we spent together.

We got into the daily habit of writing to each other,

even while living under the same roof.

I'm 18 years old...

On our wedding night, you give me your diary to read.

18 years old...

What a terrible and marvellous night...

A sleepless night.

I find myself in this huge estate,

I learn about these women with whom you had affairs,

including the one living next door with whom you have a 2-year-old son.

Not to be with you now tortures me,

but my heart turns to you more deeply and more tenderly.

I thank you for the happiness you gave me in the past,

I regret that it hasn't been as strong

and peaceful during all our life.

But our life is not over.

Or is it?

Is our life together over?

Your strength has shattered me.

Your power crushed my life and my personality as well.

Wasn't I strong enough?

I did not lack energy, though.

I spend my time stifling my talents

for you,

neglecting myself,

sacrificing myself for my family.

Is that my vocation?

At the beginning, you sometimes said to me:

"You annoy me, you go around in circles.

"The fool seeks the storm.

"This state of mind is what I fear most."

Your feelings for me vary constantly.

You go from passion

to indifference,

from high esteem to the opposite,

claiming that you lie when you say you love me,

that you're the unhappiest being in the world.

This means...

you become distant,

you avoid me,

your reproaches are cruel.

Before, I would cry,

thinking that you had finally concluded that I was stupid

and uneducated, that you regretted having married a young woman

incapable of understanding you.

I felt sorry for you for having married me.

I really pitied you, I lamented the irreparable.

Making you miserable for life was an agony.

Years later...

I understood.

It took me years to understand that your moods, your demons,

had their roots in something else:

your jealousy,

your apprehension of my stopping to love you,

of my never loving you enough.

Remember the day when I was chatting too cheerfully with Arthur's teacher,

so nice but so uninteresting...

You flew into a devilish rage.

As the innocent Desdemona, I calmly answered your questions,

not understanding what had gotten into you nor what my fault was.

I started to cry.

Worshipping you as always, I blamed myself, a futile,

stupid, miserable person,

unworthy of such a great and beautiful being.

I was so totally in love...

I didn't understand anything.

I am still in love.

You illuminate my life.

I think through your thoughts.

I see everything with your eyes,

I see the world through your eyes.

But one cannot live only

on birds,

flowers,

wilderness,

writing,

freedom...

There is also the prose of life.

Our children,

the illnesses,

the cooking,

the faults and the fights.

You intentionally ignore all this.

I shall not become you, I am not you.

I'll betray myself if I go on like this.

Why do you embarrass me in front of our friends or guests?

You constantly cut me off.

You have always done that.

My vitality and my cheerfulness trigger your anger

and suspicion.

The famous jealousy.

You compare spouses to two halves of a sheet of paper:

"If there is a little tear and you pull on it, they separate.

"This is what quarrels do.

"They are small tears in good relationships.

"Spouses' sincere relationships must be preserved.

"Never let the paper be torn."

I have difficulty controlling myself.

I am irritable,

I am nervous, I am jealous too.

And like you, I am passionate.

How often after I lost my temper have I forced the door

of the study where you write, to see you, kiss you...

ask you to forgive me.

"She rushed in and started a hysterical scene,

"her idea being that nothing can ever change,

"that she is unhappy,

"and should run away who knows where.

"I pitied her but I'm well aware that it is hopeless.

"Until I die, she'll be a millstone around my neck and the children's.

"Maybe I must learn how not to drown with a millstone around my neck.

"But the children?

"This is apparently what has to be.

"It hurts me only because I am short-sighted.

"I calmed her as you do a sick person."

I read that in your diary.

Nothing makes me happier than

your loving gaze,

your tenderness,

your appreciation for my work,

your gentle gestures.

You never apologize.

Caring for the children,

the sleepless nights with the baby and with you too,

the meals for ten people,

the servants to govern,

the running of the household, the beds for the guests,

copying and recopying your manuscripts...

all this

is so exhausting

that it leaves no room in me for any feeling

except fatigue.

This is why any discontent, any suspicion from you always drove me to despair.

Yes,

I am talking about your distrust after we were married.

You think that I am attracted to other men?

You not believing me hurts me!

Tears in your eyes,

a sweet gaze,

so sweet but so sad...

I love you so much

that I want to hug you

but I am haunted by the idea that you won't believe me.

You don't believe me.

Trust,

affection, and simplicity are the best things one can give me.

The only things that make me happy.

What escaped me then, and still do, are you constant mood swings.

You court me.

You express such tenderness,

you are so caring, you appreciate my qualities.

But your fiery passion lasts but only a moment.

I was so happy to read in your diary:

"One year since I last wrote in this notebook. A good year.

"The ties between Sonia and me have strengthened and solidified.

"We love each other,

"we are dearer to each other than anybody in the world.

"We look at each other with clear eyes.

"No secrets, nothing embarrassing.

"I feel very good,

"I'm so happy with her,

"as probably only one man in a million can be."

But your sudden despair is so deep,

so irremediable,

that it cannot be leave scars on a very young soul,

marks for life.

It is that same despair that a young child may feel

when he sees a rotten corpse for the first time.

You are interested in other things.

Writing,

supervising the estate, your businesses,

your schools...

You don't see me anymore.

You ask me if I'm well

and what I did with my day.

My answers don't interest you.

Why is that?

What did I do wrong?

Why are you so distant,

so aloof, so cold?

I wonder... in vain.

I read in your diary:

"She is sleeping peacefully,

"she'll wake up totally convinced that I am unfair

"and that she is the miserable victim of my unending whims.

"She feeds the baby, she's busy with him.

"Chatting with her is now impossible,

"while all could maybe be resolved.

"No, she did not love me, she doesn't love me.

"It scares me and hurts me now

"but did I delude myself that much?"

Do you see me as a person?

Am I a person? An object?

You need me.

Not a woman, but me. And I am here.

When you have exhausted me and exhausted your desires,

you forget me,

you turn your back on me, and then here you are again.

But I always want and need to please you.

My dream was that we could be bound by the first pure love on earth.

Why are you so tender today,

seeing only what's good in me,

when the next day, after the tenderness,

I become guilty of everything?

So cantankerous that you'd use anything that can wound and hurt me.

How can I understand

what I am guilty of?

Is it possible that I never did anything right?

I want to be good, with no one missing my flaws,

and above all never forgiving myself.

When the little one is lying on my chest and the other one embraces me,

I feel so happy...

I no longer feel jealousy, sorrow, regret, or desire.

Nothing.

For you, I'm nothing but a mangy dog.

And who are you for me?

Sometimes you sink into such melancholy that you cannot get out of it.

And I can't help you.

The thought of death torments you,

scares you or humbles you,

but it holds you without any relief.

"Children and old people are quite alike,

"yet the child doesn't know how to protect himself

"and only loves himself.

"The old man is used to protecting himself

"but doesn't love himself.

"The child loves life and doesn't fear death.

"The old man doesn't love life

"and fears death.

"The only solace about death is that all are subject to it."

You often say that you desire death but I don't quite believe you.

Unless, as Seneca says...

"Often we desire death for the very reason that we fear it."

There is a mystery in every person.

It's hard to unravel other people's thoughts.

Even the most sincere and honest of us always wear a mask

that hides what we are deep inside.

For some, their mask is better than their soul.

Others, on the contrary, have a tender and loving soul

that they don't know how to express.

Is expression that important?

Most people live as if they are blind.

Dancing in the dark,

led by unknown desires.

"How do I keep my husband close?" I asked before our marriage.

"Be a loving and honest mother and wife."

Empty words.

What it takes,

no one can explain.

It takes so much love...

Life shrinks and dwindles,

without fantasy, changes, or celebrations,

without participation in social life.

You wanted it that way

and you make sure that your wish is respected.

You live entirely in your head,

in your thoughts,

in what you want to create.

This imaginary world fulfils you.

You come back to us only for rest or diversion.

You tell me: "An artist takes the best out of his life and puts it in his work.

"This is why his work is beautiful and his life pathetic."

You think you don't have a life, that your life is pathetic?

That it is nothing? Your life is not nothing.

Your life is intense and rich, and so is mine.

My life is not nothing.

I draw, I sew your clothes and the children's,

I teach them every day.

I teach them music, I play the piano with them, I read books to them.

I plant trees.

I revise and copy your manuscripts.

I comment on them.

I live with your characters all through the writing process.

You are not interested in us.

Not in me or in the children, not in our inner life,

not in our joys or our sorrows.

With your family, you live a life more separate than real separation.

We didn't leave you,

you left us.

You told me:

"My works,

"all my works

"interested you and interest you so little

"that if you happen to read them, it will be out of curiosity.

"As for the children, they won't be interested at all.

"You think that my life is one thing and my writing another.

"But my writing is me!

"In life, I could not express my views;

"in life, I made a concession to the necessity of family life.

"I live it, yet my soul rejects this life.

"This life that is not mine, you consider it my life,

"while the life expressed by my writing,

"is for you just words without reality.

"You are the cause, the unwitting cause

"of my suffering."

One cannot hold someone by force.

Once, I was sitting on the floor...

"What are you doing? You're pregnant!"

"I'm sorting some rags."

"Get up immediately!"

You go out slamming the door.

I run after you to your study. You're in there, angry and morose.

"What is it?"

"Go away! Go away!"

I come closer, stunned: The tray, the coffee pot... boom!

Everything thrown around. Crockery shattered all over the room.

I grab your hands,

it makes you angrier,

you wrest the barometer from the wall

and smash it!

I ran to my room and cried my heart out.

How could such a small mistake move you to such wrath?

I feel abandoned.

I don't have a husband-friend.

Even the husband-lover avoids me. Why?

Why?

I was pregnant. I lost the baby.

To this day, I don't understand the causes of your rage.

Was there a reason for your anger?

Maybe there was none.

You often tell me that we are so close

that we couldn't live without each other.

I love you, even if tormented,

passionately,

poetically,

jealously.

I love this passage you read to me:

"Poetry is a fire

"lit in the soul.

"This fire burns, warms, and lights.

"Some feel the burn, others the heat,

"others see the light, some do not perceive anything at all.

"The crowd which judges poets feel no burn, no heat, and no light.

"All, anyway, think that poetry is only about illumination.

"Those who think so take themselves for writers

"and go, lantern in hand, to illuminate life.

"It seems natural to them that light is most needed

"where there is darkness and chaos.

"Others understand that what matters is heat,

"so they artificially heat what is convenient to heat.

"But the true poet,

"unwittingly and suffering from it, consumes himself

"and burns others.

"And it's all there.

"Most men live most of their lives as if in front of a mirror."

I want you to see me with the same strength

and the same intensity as at the beginning.

I remember the days when we would go skating.

Oh my...

We admired the beauty of the movements,

I let myself be intoxicated by the cold air,

my own strength and health.

The joy of the children made me forget my melancholy, and everything.

Once,

when nothing had disturbed our love and our happiness, we were like one,

united in everything:

the education of the children,

our living in the countryside,

our vision of life.

We grew together, looking in the same direction.

Doubts and questions didn't prevent us from living.

You took care of us,

each day, everything was better and sweeter.

We envisioned our children's future together.

These days, you hardly speak to me.

You make me feel like I'm lying to you,

like I don't love you enough.

I poison your life,

and I cry all the time.

I work without respite.

I suffer from the impossibility of achieving what I want to do.

I am reduced to the life of the body, but I am suffocating.

You write to me:

"I'm talking about the lack of love, not from me but from you.

"I love you. I constantly think of you, and I pity you.

"I perceive in you an irreducible hostility,

"therefore I cannot write,

"but just tell you that I am in pain."

I am withering.

When you are not busy writing,

you play the piano four to six hours a day.

Scales, exercises...

that Weber sonata

that I like a lot.

You spend your time on lonely walks. It seems you want to daze yourself,

to stop thinking about the vanity of life and your desire to end it.

It exhausts me.

You exhaust me.

"The world was void

"The populous and the powerful was a lump

"Seasonless, herbless, treeless,

"manless, lifeless

"A lump of death

"a chaos of hard clay

"The rivers, lakes

"and ocean

"all stood still. And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths

"Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea

"And their masts fell down piecemeal

"as they dropp'd

"They slept on the abyss

"without a surge

"The waves were dead

"the tides

"were in their grave

"The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before

"The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air

"And the clouds perish'd

"Darkness had no need of aid from them

"She was the Universe"

I deeply feel the sense of desolation

and loneliness...

of this poem by Byron, when we quarrel and when you go away.

When I think that you wrote...

"My awakening consisted in doubting the reality of the outside world.

"It has lost all meaning to me."

If you find it difficult,

how can you impose such a vision on your friends and family?

I no longer recall which of us started this quarrel or what triggered it.

Probably me.

I reproached you for ignoring our children,

for letting me take care of them alone.

I did not have the strength to carry the family life at arm's length without help

and being thwarted by you.

The quarrel was very violent.

You wanted nothing but to leave the family.

I had felt it.

It was like you had ripped my heart out.

After having screamed your head off,

you left, and you didn't come back all night.

I stayed there crying, for hours,

without even undressing.

In the early morning, I went out.

It was a clear morning,

marvellous, sunny.

The plants were covered with dew.

It was cold,

but nature had such majestic beauty that I pushed on to the river,

to our bathhouse.

There I undressed and entered the water.

Icy cold.

I stayed in an hour. I wanted to catch cold and die.

What I felt for you then was torturing me:

"I'll die, you'll manage alone with the children.

"When I'm gone you'll have to take care of them."

My passion for our children eventually revived me

and brought me home.

You want to leave.

You love another woman.

I mustn't show you I love you as before, it would be humiliating.

And it's a burden on you.

You eventually came home and we made up as best we could.

We cried, both of us.

I was happy to see that my love for you had not died,

that love I mourned all through that terrible night.

After that quarrel, we lived in harmony for a long time.

"What a painful habit,

"what a trouble obligation

"to be continually anxious of meeting one another,

"yet to have nothing but trifles to say to one another,

"and to communicate reciprocally things

"which were previously known to both and of no matter of importance to either.

"To go in merely to go out,

"to go out after dinner only to come home late

"highly satisfied with seeing in five hours three Swiss,

"a woman one hardly knows, and another one scarcely likes.

"Whoever rightly considers the value of time and how irreparable its loss is,

"must lament bitterly such great miseries."

Remember when we read La Bruyère's "Characters" with our friends?

And how we also read passages from our diaries?

"I still want to write to you after our phone conversation.

"I am sad,

"terribly sad.

"I want to cry.

"I do not want anything, I am unable to do anything.

"Don't think you're responsible for this condition.

"This is why I am writing to you, to tell you that this feeling

"doesn't hold any reproach or condemnation,

"there would be no reason for it.

"There are many things about you, like your relations

"with some of our friends,

"that make me happy.

"I write that one cannot move you and women in general by means of logic:

"logic irritates you, like a kind of illegitimate violence.

"Write to me, my darling.

"If the feeling that you need me gives you joy,

"I'll share that same joy. Well, that's all."

Looks like your old tenderness and attachment to me

have rekindled.

But I no longer trust you.

I no longer enjoy your fleeting amorous urges,

I hardly respond to them, I protect my heart and the freedom of my soul.

You told me:

"I'll come back to you closer to you than when I left.

"I am bored, I feel empty,

"I feel bad without you and without my work,

"I need both to live.

"I console myself by sleeping a lot.

"Well rested, I'll get along better with you and I'll work better."

But this "better" lasted only a brief moment.

I know too well the intoxication of love which follows our separations.

I feared it, I fear it.

I won't be dragged into this passion-love,

my heart is exhausted.

Is it possible for someone,

even the idlest person with the simplest life,

to achieve all the tasks assigned to her? They are endless and limitless.

You went to the well,

without asking if the little one was better,

and whether his mother was tired.

You show very little kindness to us, your family.

You're all sternness and indifference.

They'll write in your biography that you carried water

in your valet's place,

but no one will know that you never brought water to your child

for the sake of granting some respite to your wife.

Nor that in 30 years you never spent time at the bedside of a sick child

so that I could get some rest,

make up for the lack of sleep, take a walk, or just breathe.

I should only do

what I have the strength to do, without destroying my inner balance.

And contemplate calmly what I haven't done.

"You always work too much!"

This "too much" reminds me of the proverb that the Chinese paint on their homes:

"For one man living in idleness, another dies of hunger."

This is how we live.

You live according to your choices, your tastes, your needs, your desires...

But I live out of necessity, dying of the hunger

for a spiritual life and serenity, with you.

Even if my life is difficult, I support your work as a writer.

I tell you as I always did:

"Your work is more necessary than mine."

But I work relentlessly too.

And here is what distresses me:

you love your work, you live for it,

but mine is only chaos.

I don't have a life, not even a family life.

I find it hard to carry a household on my shoulders.

Why such sacrifice

in this way?

Why do human beings sacrifice themselves?

What for? Whom for?

When I see this constant maternal sacrifice...

The children are happy for a few hours, then what? So what?

To them, it's only normal. I sacrifice myself all the time.

Am I looking for good self-esteem?

Should the pleasure of sacrifice be stronger than the pleasure to live?

I'm writing in my diary. You walk in

with a terrible expression on your face.

Until then, we had been getting along without one unpleasant word, nothing.

"I am here to tell you that I want a divorce.

"I cannot live like this anymore, I'm leaving, I'll leave."

If the house had collapsed on my head, I wouldn't have been more astonished.

"What's going on?"

"Nothing.

"When you overload the mule, you end up killing it."

I didn't understand what you were talking about.

And then the shouting, the reproaches,

the insults...

I endured it all without answering.

I could see that you were enraged.

You told me:

"Where you are, the air is contaminated."

I was paralyzed on the verge of delirium.

Couldn't speak, couldn't cry.

"Kill me, but I won't open my mouth anymore!"

What did I do this time?

I lost all control over myself.

I ran outside

with only one idea in mind:

to die, in a way or another.

I sobbed and cried, you begged me to come back.

"Take me to the police or to the madhouse!"

I fell in the snow, you dragged me...

half-naked, soaked...

And here I am, sick,

abnormal, as if wiped out.

Go away, leave the house,

get it over with this life and your insufferable demands,

that's what I think of day and night.

I didn't leave the house for days and days...

Remember the modest party we threw for our 10th anniversary?

Our children, my sisters, their children and a few close friends...

Our friend David congratulated us:

"Such a happy relationship deserves compliments."

You replied: "It could have been better."

This one sentence is proof of your eternal demands that I can never satisfy.

Despite my efforts.

Disenchantment has invaded our life.

I am always amazed

to see sensuality give way to detachment.

Sometimes, in this life of indifference, I feel

a savage despair.

I could run away, fall in love with another man,

anything rather than going on living with the one I love despite everything.

You say: "There is no love,

"only the needs of the flesh

"and the rational need to have a companion."

I envy the couples

who enjoy a spiritual bond besides physical love.

I smother

my flame,

gradually...

my desire,

my various abilities,

my immense energy.

I love you with all my might.

Yes, this love was a delusion, a figment of the imagination.

What do I want? Why am I dissatisfied?

Why is my soul so torn apart?

Is it my youth claiming to live when there is no real life,

or do I feel sorry for those who are unhappy?

But happy people are selfish.

Where does happiness come from?

From fate? But what is fate?

The law of nature?

The movement of the universe?

God's will...

God?

Yes, undoubtedly.

It's good to pray to God.

I cannot accept

that everything in the universe is only a movement of atoms.

That I'm good or bad just because the weather is fine or not.

All the joys gradually disappear.

I came to a philosophy of my own which consists in living from day to day

with as much gaiety, happiness,

intensity as possible,

and to yield with humility and calm to other people's whims.

And I feel more or less fine.

Loosely based on the diary of Sophia Tolstoy

and letters from Leo to Sophia Tolstoy.