Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A few years ago, film director Jacob Perlmutter was walking through London when he spotted one of his heroes. The US street photographer Joel Meyerowitz, known for his early adoption of colour film in the 1960s, was wandering in and out of shops. A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. Perlmutter decided to approach the artist, who this time was with his wife Maggie Barrett, an English artist and writer. “I spoke to Joel for a moment and then he introduced me to Maggie,” Perlmutter recalls, sitting beside his wife and co-director Manon Ouimet on the sofa of their north London flat. “The way in which he introduced her was so open and beautiful. They seemed to have this aura about them.” It was a kind of “electricity or magnetism”. A few years later, having stumbled across Barrett’s blog, it struck him that the couple, so beguiling on the street, would make a good subject for a documentary. Perlmutter, 35, and Ouimet, 34, who would marry after filming completed, became fixed on the same idea: “What would this be like for us, as an artist couple, to make a film about another artist couple?” says Perlmutter. In late 2021, Ouimet and Perlmutter moved into the couple’s house in Tuscany, an elegantly converted sheep farm, and began to film their daily lives. Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other opens in cinemas this month. Meyorowitz was 84 when filming commenced, and Barrett was 75. To begin, their life, which is split between New York and Tuscany, appears idyllic. Meyerowitz photographs and makes books; Barrett writes, draws and plays piano. They laugh over dinner with their friends, drink tea while scrolling on their respective iPads, dance in the living room and play ping pong in the garden. But a few months into the year, Barrett suffers an injury that renders her bedridden, and overnight Meyerowitz becomes her carer. The shift in dynamic raises to the surface emotions that have long been simmering. Where Meyerowitz has had an eminent career, with a MoMA retrospective, a Guggenheim fellowship and more than 50 photography books to his name, Barrett has yet to receive recognition for her painting, and has self-published all of her novels. In the film, we see Meyerowitz busy publishing new work, while Barrett tends to the houses. They are “constantly in conversation” about the gulf between their creative lives, says Perlmutter. They are “consciously trying to sort it out before one of them dies. Because after someone dies, if that imbalance isn’t resolved, then it’s really tough for the person left living.” Towards the end of the film, the conversation reaches boiling point, and there follows an existential row about Barrett being made to feel her life matters less than Meyerowitz’s. The film provokes bigger questions about the imbalances that can underline a relationship. Says Ouimet: “You don’t have to be a world-famous photographer and an aspiring artist or an unknown artist. In every relationship, there is a power dynamic that can be difficult.” The film is extraordinary to watch for the elegance of the filmmaking, with the long shots of the Tuscan hills at golden hour and the intimacy afforded with the artists during such a difficult period in their lives (we see them lying in bed in the morning, talking about where they want their ashes scattered, and clutching one another in a bath surrounded by candles). “Their courage to keep being totally open in their dialogue is really powerful,” says Perlmutter. And the directors worked hard to show the dynamic as they experienced it. At the end of every edit, says Ouimet, “we’d ask ourselves, ‘Is that Maggie and Joel?’ And if it didn’t feel like we represented them as we witnessed them, then we would go back in and start again.”The sensitivity with which the film is made belies the fact that this is their first documentary, the first feature film either has made, and the first longform project on which they have collaborated. Perlmutter, who grew up in London before studying film at Arts University Bournemouth, has directed 20 music videos as well as some short films, including one with the socialite and poet Greta Bellamacina, as well as working as a photographer. Ouimet, also from London, worked as an events manager at nightclubs before doing a masters at University of the West of England, and has gone on to win awards for her photography, which has been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, among other locations.Ouimet was also pregnant for most of the filming, which the pair managed between them for the most part: co-directing, with Perlmutter doing the cinematography and Ouimet the sound (despite having never done it before). It had the potential to be an intense time. But in fact, “it was beautiful”, says Ouimet. She and Meyerowitz were “the chefs in the house”, says Perlmutter, and would cook extravagant dinners. The four of them would spend evenings sitting and talking by the fire. “We were able to coexist in a very fluid, simpatico manner. It was very special,” says Ouimet. Witnessing the way in which Meyerowitz and Barrett negotiated their difficulties has also been valuable for the directors’ own relationship. For Ouimet, for instance, seeing the fiery argument and the way that the couple suddenly snapped out of it by finding something funny was a valuable lesson. “I’ve had a fear of anger; I think a lot of women can relate to that, and being present in that moment and observing that level of confrontation, but also resolution, has given me a sense of courage around that – and around expressing my anger with you,” she says, looking at Perlmutter. “But also acknowledging that it can be resolved in a very beautiful, playful, kind way.”Neither director feels the imbalance seen in Meyerowitz and Barrett’s creative lives in their own dynamic, but Ouimet “recognised” it, she says. They started a company together for their commercial work before this film, and she “had quite a bit of internal fear about that”, she says. “Would one person rise above the other and what would be the division of workload and how would we, as two artists with egos, share that space?” But now, after years of working together, she says “it’s never felt like that”; in the course of filming, they were “side by side”. Meyerowitz and Barrett have also emerged from the experience with new-found wisdom. “Maggie has said, ‘Couples shouldn’t do therapy. Every couple should have a documentary made about them,’” laughs Perlmutter. Barrett, they have observed, is freer from the feelings of disappointment in her career. “She doesn’t feel that so much any more,” Ouimet says. “This process of filmmaking really gave Maggie a gift of being seen and recognised. That gave her the courage to continue.” The four of them remain close: Ouimet and Meyerowitz are currently collaborating on “a very playful experimental photographic project”, she says, while Perlmutter and Barrett are working on “a written something. Or performed something”. The couple are also halfway through filming their first fiction feature film, a psychological horror about pregnancy and motherhood. They’ve been working on it late in the evening, after they’ve finished working on their respective projects, and once they’ve put their two-year-old daughter to bed. “When you both love something so much, collaboration is just the best fun thing ever,” Perlmutter says. He remembers reading Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, in which she wrote about her relationship with the writer Sam Shepard, and the way they would stay up all night writing plays together. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s so romantic. How could you possibly find someone like that?’ And here we are.” Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 March
