Wendy Ide 

Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other review – raw portrait of a marriage

In this sometimes hard-to-watch documentary, photographer Joel Meyerowitz and writer Maggie Barrett’s fraught relationship is there for all to see
  
  

Maggie Barrett sits on the floor surrounded by personal papers while Joel Meyerowitz takes a photo of her
At home with the ‘exceptionally courageous’ Joel Meyerowitz and Maggie Barrett. Photograph: Modern Films/Manon et Jacob

Joel Meyerowitz is a world-renowned American street photographer; his wife, Maggie Barrett, is a British writer, pianist and composer who has struggled to match her husband’s success. Neither, it’s fair to say, appear to be easy people to live with. But they are exceptionally courageous and generous in laying open their relationship in this painfully intimate documentary.

Directed by husband-and-wife team Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter, this is an uncomfortably raw picture that touches on ageing, artistic fulfilment and the fear, on Maggie’s part, of being subsumed and sidelined by the juggernaut of Joel’s career success. It’s fascinating but not an easy watch: there’s one scene so stingingly intense that you wonder it doesn’t strip the paint from the walls of their Manhattan apartment.

  • In UK and Irish cinemas

Watch a trailer for Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other.
 

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