Billy Edwards

BILLY EDWARDS is a 42-year-old advertising executive with a receding hairline, walrus mustache and a comparatively well-preserved, tubular-shaped physique of which he is proud. His wife, Antoinette, 30, is a former secretary to Shelley Winters. She has the kind of trim, well-packed figure that tends to look too plump in clothes, a face that becomes suddenly beautiful when she smiles, and, apparently, she doesn't shave under her arms.

Billy and Antoinette live in a casually decorated (inflatable furniture, highly polished floors, multicolored kitchen, hi-fi, Pop posters), two-story frame house in Toronto with their 3-year-old son, Bogart, and a dog named Merton.

They are real people, and they are the stars of a new cinéma vérité film by Allan

In the course of the production, Billy and Antoinette came close to separating, which gives structure to the 97-minute film that King and his editor, Arla Saare, have put together from some 70 hours of original footage.

The 40-year-old King is one of the most talented of the filmmakers now exploring the possibilities of documentary cinema, but it seems to me that in "A Married Couple" (which he calls "actuality drama" or "living drama") he has pushed filmed sociology into the murky outer reaches of psychodrama. In terms of straight, cinematic art, "A Married Couple" ranks somewhere above "King, Murray" but somewhere below such real movies as "Birth of a Nation" or even "Bob & Carol & Ted &

"I'm completely bewildered," Billy says toward the end of the film. "It seems that everytime we get on some plateau of understanding, the next minute we are kicking and screaming."

Throughout "A Married Couple," which opened yesterday at the Kips Bay, it's perfectly apparent that Billy and Antoinette are playing to the camera, in moments of anger, intimacy and even boredom. It may be no accident that both of them were, at earlier stages in their lives, aspiring actors who never made it. The unreality prompted by the camera's presence is acknowledged in the film, which then proceeds to pass off this conscious performance as some kind of meta-truth that is neither fact nor fiction.

What King ultimately proves, I think, is that something that is neither fact nor fiction is less meta-truth than sophisticated sideshow. As I've never believed there is a novel in everybody, nor even a tape-recorded book, I now am convinced there are probably very few people worthy of being the subjects of an actuality drama. Better than any other instrument, perhaps, the documentary camera can capture the sense and feeling of events, of social climates, and even of people in public crisis, but meaningful private drama must always elude it since the camera is stopped by what Arthur Miller once called "the wall of the