We can’t help but admire couples who stick it out together for decades. There’s even whole swaths of Gen Z TikTokers taking to the streets to interview older couples about their secrets to a long and healthy relationship. In this remarkable documentary by filmmakers Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet, we meet an extraordinary couple in the form of famed street photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his partner, writer, artist and musician Maggie Barrett. Here Anna Bogutskaya speaks to Perlmutter and Ouimet about their creative journey into this couples’ lives.
As part of our ongoing partnership with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), we selected “Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other” as our pick of the 2024 festival. The film will be screened at WePresent Night at Eye Filmmuseum on November 21, alongside a conversation with co-director Jacob Perlmutter.
In 2019, photographer and filmmaker Jacob Perlmutter spotted famed New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz on the street in London. It was a meet-cute of sorts. “I wasn’t fully sure if it was him,” he tells me, “so I kind of followed him for a while, in and out of a couple of shops.” Perlmutter lost him, but serendipitously spotted him again a few years later, this time with his partner, writer Maggie Barrett. “I saw them side by side, and they had this incredible aura about them, an energy and an elegance that really went deep.” The image of them two together—Meyerowitz, bald and sinewy, with his famed Leica perennially hanging off his shoulder; Barrett, with short, spiky hair and a sharp gaze—stayed with him for years. Randomly, or rather fortuitously, Perlmutter came across Barrett’s writing online and connected with her work, too. That chance encounter gave the photographer an idea, which he pitched to Barrett and Meyerowitz: making a documentary about their relationship.
Perlmutter met them on the street alone, but he brought home that image of the elder artist couple to his partner, Manon Ouimet, who’s also a photographer and filmmaker. “We lived with their image,” Ouimet remembers, “the image of what it would be like to be in your seventies and eighties, in love, creating together and collaborating.” That was the selling point for Ouimet, whose background is in portrait photography: “to look at the future would look like for us and what it means to have a relationship that’s full of love and energy and creativity.”
That chance encounter on the street led to an email correspondence, which turned into a dinner in Meyerowitz and Barrett’s home in Tuscany, eventually inspiring a creative collaboration between the two artist couples. “They liked our work, and then as a couple, I think that they felt a huge connection with us. I think they felt valued for who they are rather than what they do,” Perlmutter remembers.
“Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other” is Perlmutter and Ouimet’s first foray into filmmaking. The documentary is a portrait that lays bare the profound, intense and decades-long relationship between two big artistic personalities and the rifts that can form even in the deepest love.
A film of this intimacy demands an honest relationship between subject and documentarian. To film “Two Strangers,” Perlmutter and Ouimet moved in with Meyerowitz and Barrett. They became acquainted with their routines and their space. On a practical level, their cameras were small and unobtrusive. Plus, “Joel also has quite a lot of cameras around the house. So what’s one more?” Meyerowitz and Barrett split their time between New York and Tuscany, and their shared spaces are a crucial element of the film. Every room is exquisitely designed, with small details that add information about the central couple: a flying baby in a corner; an angel head in their bedroom; a portrait of a feather hanging above a bed. “I don’t want to do us a disservice,” jokes Perlmutter, “but it’s hard to get a bad shot. And because we lived in the space, we got to know every nook and cranny.”
This invisible work awards the film an almost eerie intimacy. The camera stays still while arguments erupt and resentments are exhumed. “We often let the camera roll,” the filmmakers explain, “Sometimes we would leave the room and let things unfold as they would like … We found a way of disappearing, and we created an environment that Maggie and Joel felt comfortable enough to be themselves,” Ouimet recalls. It also allowed them the space to let the film’s themes unfold—love, mortality, the artist’s life, power imbalance. “Each of these themes, we had a kind of an internal visual kind of Bible that we would adhere to,” they point out to me.
It’s never all roses and Tuscan sunsets, though. The power of “Two Strangers” lies in its refusal to look away from the cracks in a relationship. In the case of Barrett and Meyerowitz, it’s the power imbalance between him, a globally renowned and prolific artist, and her a less recognized one. In one scene, they talk about their legacies, wrapped up in each other in crisp, white linens: “When you die, your obituary will appear in The New York Times. Mine won’t,” she tells him. This was a surprise for the filmmakers: “We didn’t know that this was a part of their relationship,” Ouimet says. “When we started filming, we didn’t know that this imbalance seeped into their day-to-day.” Once revealed, it was really important, when they were filming and editing, that they gave them both equal placement and gave them both a voice. Meyerowitz’s photography inspired the framing of the shots and the music, composed by Diogo Strausz, takes its inspiration from Barrett’s own piano compositions, helping smooth out that central conflict and embedding both artists in the film’s language.
The film isn’t interested in spending much time on Barrett’s and Meyerowitz’s work—we barely see any photographs, hardly hear any book excerpts—instead focusing on the in-between moments. The artists between the art shows and publications. How they live, how they talk to each other, how they love. “It’s very rare to walk away from an experience feeling energized from people, and I felt energized by them,” says Ouimet, “I still, to this day, feel energized by them. It’s a very somatic, visceral experience being with Maggie and Joel.”
After filming was done, they spent a year editing without Barrett and Meyerowitz. They didn’t share any footage with them, but at the end of the day, Perlmutter and Ouimet would walk away from the desk and ask themselves “whether that was Maggie and Joel. Would they be able to walk together and see themselves reflected back at them? Not our meditation of them, but themselves.”
When the couple watched the film in Copenhagen, where the filmmakers were editing, they had no edit notes. Since then, Joel and Maggie have seen the film six times, “and each time they grow from it,” recalls Ouimet. Watching it with audiences at film festivals and screenings is “one of the most beautiful, spectacular experiences. They walk away softer. They are able to see themselves and want to grow.”
Perlmutter and Ouimet themselves feel changed, personally and creatively, by the experience of making the film, getting to know Barrett and Meyerowitz, and bearing witness to the ebbs and flows of their relationship: “Watching Maggie and Joel, you’re seeing two people live and breathe art on a day-to-day basis, even if they’re not attacking the canvas or taking the picture every single moment of every day, that there’s always something creative cognitively happening. And it’s something that I recognize in Jacob as well.”
“Two Strangers,” like any relationship, is about conversations. Some can be shocking, arresting in their brutal honesty. But throughout every scene there pulses a fearless love and intense desire to connect. “Maggie and Joel are fearless; they defy the stereotypical older person who kind of closes down,” the filmmakers reflect. “They show you that older age can be this ever- expanding, kaleidoscopic journey. And if you have the openness to go there, it provides an endless abundance.”