Director: Manon Quimet, Jacob PerlmuterStars: Maggie Barrett, Joel Meyerowitz, Brenda BufalinoThis artful but frank documentary depicts the loving but turbulent relationship between successful American photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his British partner Maggie Barrett. Maggie is an author but has only produced one self-published book. Joel is a trim, youthful and sharp eighty-four-year-old; she is nine years his junior. Despite them both being in enviably good shape, Maggie confesses her concerns about their mortality. The picture elegantly observes the couple in their quotidian life, in their spacious luxury Manhattan apartment, and their rustic home in Tuscany. What emerges is Maggie’s resentment of Joel’s success, at first simmering, and then exploding in a scene where, bored of rattling around their Manhattan apartment, she lets rip on her silent, visually obscured partner. It’s an electric moment in an otherwise mannered portrait of a relationship, captured in images as poised and centred as Joel’s photographs. The picture is occasionally dull and has a therapist couch feel, and audiences may struggle to identify with the couple’s immense privilege. The brown and gold-hued tones of the interior shots speak to the couple’s autumnal years, but also perhaps to their gilded existence.

David Willoughby

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