Binge-r #261: Scenes from a Marriage + Maid

Fault Lines: Oscar Isaac (Jonathan) and Jessica Chastain (Mira) in Scenes from a Marriage

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

Streaming Service: Binge

Availability: All five episodes now streaming

It’s perfectly understandable to feel wary of this intimidating limited series: a remake of an Ingmar Bergman treatise on a perilous relationship built around chamber piece scenes pitting movie stars Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac against one another as a fraying couple. It’s so Prestige TV that the score’s tensile string quartet is superfluous. But while Scenes from a Marriage earns every seriously acted piece of that façade, it also makes much of the opportunity afforded to it. It is serious, it is impeccably performed, and it does have grand ambitions – that’s a rarefied niche that is worth adding to your portfolio of shows, even as a palate cleanser. I waited until all five weekly episodes had accumulated on Binge before watching it, discovering a focus and momentum that picked up with each instalment.

Flourishes aside, the format used by Israeli filmmaker Hagai Levi (The Affair) adheres to Bergman’s, well at least what I remember of the VHS tape of the international movie edit of Bergman’s 1973 Swedish television series I saw over 25 years ago. Tech exec Mira (Chastain) and academic Jonathan (Isaac) are a happy but maybe not so happily married couple, the fissures in their relationship apparent from the first exchanges and soon widened by an unexpected choice. Everything here is freighted with significance – Jonathan is an asthmatic, meaning that he struggles to breath at times. Inside the family home she is paying for, the couple acquire an unreliable orbit as they try to shield their four-year-old daughter. There’s no release valve: when another couple come to dinner they have a meltdown about their open marriage that just stokes the unease.

These are literally scenes – single encounters, charged and concise, free of quotidian detail. You can trace the ideas and lines of debate through an episode, especially as the pair are drawn to articulating what they perceive of their union. Depending on your outlook their ability to stay in a conversation even as their situation implodes is either admirable or implausible. Months or even years separate each episode, so that there’s a degree of catching up to be worked through. Levi’s considered direction makes clear that this is a show about performances, and the symmetry is both a touch obvious and fulfilling for the leads, who explore the changing shape of Mira and Jonathan’s dynamic while flipping gender archetypes. This is explicitly a Work – it isn’t trying to obscure the seams and strings behind naturalism. But if you give Scenes from a Marriage a chance, it’s more than a test of your viewing endurance.

Living on the Edge: Margaret Qualley (Alex) in Maid

MAID (Netflix, all 10 episodes now streaming): You rarely see genuine poverty – the grim, day-to-day struggle to stay housed and fed – anywhere aside from the margins of an American television series, but it’s central to this quietly moving drama about a young mother trying to make sense of a system that has no sympathy for her. The impressive Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) plays Alex, who flees her emotionally abusive partner with her two-year-old daughter and $18. Adapted from Stephanie Land’s memoir, Maid has the kind of lived-in detail that stings – working as a cleaner after realising that society’s safety net is torn and threadbare, Alex is literally down in the muck. But Molly Smith Metzler’s show mostly avoids easy emotional triumphs. It has an empathy for the people Alex meets, while steadily unfolding initially one-dimensional roles such as Alex’s estranged mother, Paula (Andie MacDowell, Qualley’s real-life mother). The narrative moves at a constrained pace, making you feel the constraints and challenges the protagonist faces, but Qualley is exceptional at anchoring every scene she’s in.

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020, 150 minutes) is still too incomprehensible to parse, but the war against the future plot of this sci-fi action nonetheless allows for charged action sequences and Robert Pattinson as a foppish spy; Schumacher (2021, 113 minutes) is a detailed documentary about the legendary Formula One car racer whose impervious nerve and dedication took him to the top of the sport.

New on SBS on Demand: Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent are magnificent together in Richard Eyre’s moving drama Iris (2001, 88 minutes), a biopic about the final years of the acclaimed British novelist Irish Murdoch, who developed Alzheimer’s, and her Oxford University professor husband, John Bayley, while Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville play the eccentric couple as young lovers.

New on Stan: Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995, 122 minutes) is a spectral reincarnation of the western, with Johnny Depp as the newcomer to the frontier who disappears into the black and white netherworld; Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis make the most of We’re the Millers (2013, 106 minutes) a goofy comedy about a cheery group of criminals and outsiders posing as a happy family for smuggling purposes.

>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s taut European crime thriller Ganglands and Stan’s empathetic Canadian comedy Sort of.

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