The raw, emotional power of Scenes From A Marriage

With its stripped back production, this new TV drama relies almost entirely on the talents of its A-list cast.

It’s remarkable how effective music is in directing your emotional response to a scene in a movie or TV show.

We’ve all felt a stirring score in helping us feel connected to characters’ state of being, ranging from grief to triumph. Or tensed up with the sharp plucks of violin strings in a horror movie.

But when there is no score, there is nowhere to hide. Everything else has to be working in perfect symphony – and that’s the case for Scenes From A Marriage, a commanding and poignant five-part miniseries starting tonight on Foxtel*.

Adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Swedish drama, Scenes From A Marriage is almost entirely reliant on the power of its two extraordinary and compassionate central performances from Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac.

They’re compelling to the point that it might be triggering for anyone feeling vulnerable about their relationship, especially in lockdown.

Chastain and Isaac play Mira and Jonathan, married for 10 years. He’s a philosophy professor and she’s an executive at a tech company. They have one young daughter. From the outside, they look like a happy, successful couple.

Scenes From A Marriage is perfectly cast. Picture: HBO

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But it’s that word – “success” – which Jonathan bristles at as if it’s some sort of bourgeois standard of romantic love and morality. He has a tendency to rationalise the irrational.

So, some months later, when Mira tells him she’s leaving, that she’s been on the verge of leaving every day for eight months, it shakes him to the core.

Scenes From A Marriage is exactly what it says in the title, the most dramatic moments in a relationship that is at times passionate and painful, banal and bustling.

It’s played out in lengthy, dialogue-heavy scenes – hour-long episodes range from one emotionally draining scene to a handful at most – and 95 per cent of the series is set within the one suburban house. Where there is sometimes a musical score, composed by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, is in the transitions.

The almost stripped-back production, and director Hagai Levi and cinematographer Andrij Parekh’s spartan, unobtrusive filmmaking, favouring long takes, means Chastain and Isaac’s performances do all the heavy lifting.

Scenes From A Marriage is on Foxtel On Demand. Picture: HBO

It’s almost like a stage production – and it does at times feel like you’re watching a filmed theatrical experience, but not in a negative way.

That’s why the casting here in so key. Chastain and Isaac, long-time friends since their Julliard days, have a natural chemistry, easily modulated to portray shifting dynamics in Mira and Jonathan’s relationship, tender one moment, bitter the next.

Sometimes, it’s the old, open wounds that only they know how to make worse, reacting out of hurt, or it’s the desire of two people who know each inch of each other’s bodies. From scene to scene, Chastain and Isaac created a couple that feel as if they have history.

Even as time shifts, as months pass between scenes, at each point you believe that their lives continued off-screen. And we, the audience, are only intruding on specific intimate moments.

The series is interested in the thorniness of flawed relationship. It’s not an easily defined, but isn’t that true of all honest, albeit not necessarily successful, partnerships?

It could’ve all gone so wrong if Chastain and Isaac hadn’t brought the raw power of their enormous talents. We’re lucky they did.

Scenes From A Marriage is on Foxtel On Demand now

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*Foxtel is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of news.com.au

Originally published as The raw, emotional power of Scenes From A Marriage