Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other: elegant portrait of an artist marriage

“Artists reach a certain age and suddenly they paint the skull. Death is coming,” a spotlit Joel Meyerowitz tells a rapt audience at a retrospective stage talk. “And it may… be age-related,” adds the grandee of colour street and landscape photography, clicking to a still life photo of a burnished golden leaf propped tall and glowing against a shrouded backdrop. It’s a picture we have already seen, over the bed in the Tuscan villa Meyerowitz shares with Maggie Barrett, in one of a series of tableaux-style scenes composed with idyllic symmetry: addressing each other across the bed, they discuss the time they have left, who might go first, and who would be left standing alone.

Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other – a title lent by Meyerowitz at the end of a prologue in which the couple light candles for the f ilm and lie back to remember their first attraction, 30-plus years ago – is the second great documentary in as many years invited to explore the relationship of a late-life couple with unprecedented intimacy and candour. But where Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory (2023) watched Chilean broadcaster Augusto Góngora’s slide into dementia and actor Paulina Urrutia’s shift into the role of his carer, Two Strangers depicts the stage before that, when equality, mutuality, equilibrium, harmony can still be a marital goal. The film is an ongoing two-shot: in its balancing of Meyerowitz and Barrett in frame but also in its dovetailed editing, alternating their voices or cross-cutting, notably when Meyerowitz is in bustling New York and Barrett warming their Tuscan country retreat

The filmmakers, Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet, photographers themselves, are a younger couple, able to coax this sense of balance and counterpoint by embedding themselves with their subjects apart as well as together; perhaps projecting forward in their own lives, they honour their subjects with images composed with poise and lustre. Meyerowitz and Barrett, in turn, are clearly game, productive participants in an act of mutual self-portraiture that brings them together creatively. It ’s no coincidence that a film that demands such performed, committed self-exposure takes artists as its subjects, nor that a four-artist collaboration is so richly artful.

Of course, there are differences within the film’s central couple – of history, personality and luck. Meyerowitz, 84 at the time of filming, is older (“think back to when you were 75,” Barrett asks him to empathise early on), but he is still lithe and eager, jazzed when out and about with his camera, supple when they dance to a record. Barrett, a writer, artist and musician whose piano playing and compositions inform the soundtrack, with a striking blonde crown to match her sharp southern-English articulation, has had the harder life: more marriages, hospitalisations, career rejections, less fame and success. 

Perhaps it’s easier for him to be always “nice and priestly and Buddhist”, as she rails in a moment of fury. She still hears her mother’s belittling voice – “If you’re having a good time, something bad’s going to happen” – and when a street accident hospitalises her with a fractured femur, and an osteoporosis diagnosis deepens her physical challenges, their relationship reaches a pivot point. 

What follows is a putting away of worldly things: a farewell to Tuscany, an interlude in New York, as they sift and pare away their belongings. There are tensions, Meyerowitz finding it harder to let go; his greater footprint in the world brings a pressure, expressed as the sound of assistants and agents in his home studio, scanning 70,000 negatives in preparation for a Tate retrospective, impinging on Barrett’s limited sanctum. As if in response to this polishing and preoccupation, she shreds and burns her journals, with a violent tenacity that builds to a set-piece blow-out, a catharsis and purging of her pent-up resentments. “ Take a good fucking look,” she snarls – to her husband but more to us, defying the erasure she has felt.

Together they make new land in Cornwall, near the rocks at Clodgy Point where a young Barrett used to f ind peace watching the crashing waves. Rising, ebbing, forward, back, commingling, dissolving, making a mark, washing away. A bigger whole, a place to find yourself and lose yourself.

► Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other is in UK cinemas 21 March.