A Married Couple

Allan King’s follow-up to Warrendale was another landmark of direct-cinema filmmaking. Clive Barnes in the New York Times hailed A Married Couple as "quite simply one of the greatest movies I have ever seen." Culled from 70 hours of footage shot over 10 weeks — noted cinematographer Richard Leiterman, another CBC Vancouver alumnus, was cameraman — the film captures the troubled relationship of an upwardly mobile young couple. Former bohemians Billy and Antoinette, apparently uninhibited by the presence of King’s film crew, squabble about everything: sex, money, the car, their son Bogart, even how to use a vacuum. How much of this conflict is being "acted out" for the benefit of the camera is an issue raised by all of King’s "actuality dramas." "By turn exquisitely painful and hilariously funny...The film delicately balances fiction and direct cinema and raises basic aesthetic issues about both...King’s intentions were to create an emotional experience rather than a simple record of the events" (The Canadian Film Encyclopedia). "King creates a drama that, in its utter nakedness, makes John Cassavetes’s Faces look like early Doris Day...[It] achieves the ultimate artifice of the documentarist, the feeling that it was somehow made without a camera" (Time). Colour, 96 mins.