Oscar Isaac kisses Jessica Chastain before the gala screening of 'Secrets of a Marriage' at the Venice Film Festival.YARA NARDI / Reuters
Marianne and Johan loved each other.
Really, for years.
It may even that love still reigns between them.
But it is no longer enough.
Because their relationship was also adding scars: misunderstandings, difficult decisions, mistakes, suffering.
An abyss, which time dug while they looked away.
"Everything has gone to hell, without knowing why," the protagonist of
Secrets of a marriage
resigned.
, the devastating series that Ingmar Bergman filmed in 1973, with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson.
Almost 50 years later, there are still no answers.
Nobody, after all, really knows what happens in a couple.
But television is investigating it again.
Behind the camera, this time, is Hagai Levi.
In front, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain.
His home looks more modern, of course, just like his dialogues.
However, the new version of the series keeps its ambitious attempt the same: to unravel the mystery of love.
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The play will be seen on HBO beginning September 13. But, before, it has been screened at the Venice festival. At the moment, his link with the critics has not been very passionate. Rather tepid: an enthusiastic hug for the two actors, but just a pat for the production itself. After viewing two chapters, the verdict seems ambivalent:
Secrets of a marriage
strives to build a credible and contemporary couple, away from stereotypes and clichés. He wants anyone to be able to see his story reflected in Mira and Jonathan - the new names of the protagonists -, experience their euphoria and their heartbreak. Here, however, is the main problem. Pending so many modern concerns, the series is somewhat careless with the most important: emotions. And so the magisterial tension that Bergman built has partially faded. The impression, yes, is that the work improves with the passing of the minutes. And the comparison, in any case, forces her to measure herself against a masterpiece.
Hagai Levi knew perfectly well.
“I did not see the original for a year.
I had to get to the point where I could think I was even bad, to feel free.
Now I can love her again ”, assured the filmmaker in a meeting with a group of journalists on Sunday at La Mostra.
And Chastain confessed that he not only knew her, but that he adored the original series.
And Ulmann's performance: "It assumes perfection, so it couldn't be discouraging."
The actress, in any case, was perfectly aware of the challenge of assuming that role.
The two actors with director Hagai Levi, in Venice.
Joel C Ryan / AP
"It was exhausting. And very painful. When we started filming it became a kind of experience outside my own body ”, he assured. So much so that, while his two characters discovered whether they love each other, hate each other, or both, the very relationship between the interpreters apparently went up the roller coasters. Although its pillars were proof of any filming. “We have grown up together,” Chastain summed it up. Specifically, they met in high school, when Isaac was the best friend of her boyfriend. They have gone through the Juilliard Conservatory of Art, their first releases, the selection of the cast of
About Llewyn Davis
that launched the actor's career - "I told him they wouldn't get it," she recalled with a laugh - and even a movie as co-stars ,
The most violent year.
The friendship of a lifetime helped them, according to her, but it also complicated things.
“When you know someone so well, you realize if something is wrong with them, or if it bothers them. It is as if you have immediate language, or read their mind. We also know how to get pissed off, or hurt. And say something like that right before 'action!' Is heard. So at times the series seems like a documentary, "added Chastain. It's hard to understand the line between joke and reality. What is clear is that the experience was tremendously intense for everyone. “Then we need some time to recover. We said that for a few weeks we lived on another planet ”, explained the director. To manage such fragile material, both appreciated the presence on the set of an intimacy coordinator,a professional figure emerged in recent years in Hollywood and responsible for the filming of sexual sequences or high physical and emotional commitment does not bother whoever stars in it, or whoever is filming it.
Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, at one point in the series.
The context also blurred the boundaries of fiction. They filmed in October last year, when the world was still learning to get used to the health crisis. "After months of confinement and confinement, anyone had some strange situation with their partner," summarized Chastain. And they themselves spent a month rehearsing - "something that doesn't usually happen on television," according to Levi - and talking about the script and its possibilities. The actress, for example, insisted that her character had never thought of the idea of getting married before. And some viewers, it seems, have been shocked by the role reversal. Because she pursues a solid career, while he dedicates himself above all to the profession of father and householder. “It is interesting to note that it can still surprise or generate rejection.Men have prioritized that all along and it's normal. Why should the opposite be weird? ”Asked the interpreter.
Chastain swears, yes, that the set did not become a collective session of psychotherapy: “It is not that I came home and reconsidered one thing or another.
But I do hope the audience will. "
A delicate process, of course.
Perhaps the series will bury more than one marriage.
But it may also save some.
Love, after all, is a mystery.
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