Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain aren’t very good at being married. Then again, are any of us? (Sorry, honey; they made me write that.) HBO just dropped the first trailer for Scenes From a Marriage, the upcoming five-part series that will reunite Isaac and Chastain as husband and wife (a role they previously played in 2014’s A Most Violent Year), but this time around it’s much more relatable—in the most painful way possible—as the couple falls in and out of love and struggles to maintain their relationship as the years tick by and both characters evolve and change. According to the limited series’ official synopsis:
A captivating re-examination of the dilemmas probed by the original, the five-episode limited series explores love, hatred, desire, monogamy, marriage, and divorce through the lens of a contemporary American couple. Mira (Jessica Chastain) is a confident, ambitious tech executive left unfulfilled by her marriage, and Jonathan (Oscar Isaac) is a cerebral and accommodating philosophy professor desperate to keep their relationship intact. Throughout, Scenes From A Marriage mines the full complexity of Jonathan and Mira as individuals who ultimately know their marriage isn’t being torn apart by any one event or flaw, resulting in a radically honest series that allows the audience to eavesdrop on private conversations between two people torn between feelings of hate and love.
If it all sounds rather deep and depressing and Freudian, that’s because it’s an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Swedish miniseries of the same name, which tackled the same very complex topics and was partly biographical—based on Bergman’s own relationships (he was married five times), including his longtime romance with muse Liv Ullmann (who starred in the miniseries). Scenes From a Marriage is a deeply personal drama that is seen from the perspective of both partners—which makes Hagai Levi, creator of The Affair, the perfect person to have at the helm of its adaptation.
Scenes From a Marriage will debut on September 12, 2021.
