Chances are there will not be a moving image more striking at this year’s Venice Film Festival than this li’l video of Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain captured on the red carpet on Saturday. On the off chance you did not already see this marvelous work of cinema, we offer it below in its purest form with a “holy crap”-like caption from a swooning film critic and an enormous watermark in the center. Put your seat backs and tray tables up. We’re going in.
So what exactly is happening in this slowed-down 52-second clip, this Zapruder film of Eros, which has been viewed over five million times as of Sunday morning? Let’s get our bearings.
Chastain and Isaac were arriving at the premiere of Scenes From A Marriage, which isn’t a movie but a television series debuting on HBO on September 12. The Venice Film Festival screened all five episodes (just shy of five hours), so anyone willing to sit for that long in a theater is certainly deserving of a special pre-show spectacle like this.
If Scenes From A Marriage sounds familiar, that’s because it’s based on a provocative television series from 1974 written and directed by Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman. It was later abridged and released theatrically and became something of an art house success in the United States. (The abridged cut, at a measly two hours and forty-nine minutes, is currently available to stream on HBO Max. If you want the original, the mighty Criterion Channel has all six 50-ish minute episodes of complex matrimonial distress for you to sink your teeth into.)
This new Isaac-Chastain version is adapted by Hagai Levi, an Israeli writer, director, and producer who is best known for creating the series In Treatment. As Levi told me in a soon-to-run interview here on V.F., Isaac and Chastain, who have been good friends since their days at Juilliard, kept it light on set with “their own private jokes” during the pandemic-era shoot on a soundstage in Mount Vernon, New York. This comfort with one another is evident in other images from the Scenes red carpet.
But it’s the first video that has made the biggest impact, and some film scholars pointed out that we’ve seen Chastain hold Isaac’s face before, in the 2014 J.C. Chandor film A Most Violent Year. (The image on the right is a different angle from the red carpet.)
As far as that arm kiss, well, keep in mind that Isaac did record the voice of Gomez in an animated Addams Family project.
There were other amusing comments concerning the two actors who, we should emphasize, have been good chums since the early aughts, are both happily married with two children each, and are actors.
This one is my personal favorite, because it suggests that Jamie Lee Curtis left Isaac’s wife Elvira Lind a private message in the public sphere or does not care who knows her business.
In addition to Scenes From A Marriage, Isaac was also repping Dune at this year’s Venice fest. Earlier in the week, Timothée Chalamet posted this image to his Instagram stories, suggesting that Chastain’s knees must be made of galvanized steel to resist buckling on the red carpet.
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