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I was eager to watch Stefan Golaszewski's latest TV venture, having been a big fan of both of his previous TV series, Him & Her, and Mum. He observes relationships brilliantly, drawing subtle portraits with sensitivity and humour. Despite its mixed reviews, I loved Marriage just as much. Primarily it explores the twenty-seven-year marriage of Ian and Emma as they battle the everyday difficulties of loss, desire (extramarital), ambition, and apparently meaningless arguments over the banalities of jacket potatoes and roast chickens.
Many of the scenes simply show the couple moving around each other in silence doing household tasks like loading the dishwasher and sorting the recycling. Watching this gives the viewer an odd sense of intimacy. Their ordinary actions are often deeply meaningful—Ian wipes the dust from an old photo of their wedding; Emma shares her chocolate with him in a tiny unspoken love ritual. But these domestic intricacies sit alongside the glaring lack of communication between them. This is a couple who do not have a verbal language for their feelings. They ask each other about their days and each report that it has been “fine” or “good”. But the viewer has been party to these days filled with the passive aggression of colleagues and lonely disconnection.
This lack of connection is a strong theme in the drama. We see its roots in Emma's relationship with her father. She tries to talk to him about her holiday with a forced cheeriness whilst he stares coldly into the middle distance. He is punishing her for having “abandoned him” by going on holiday with her husband and she knows this. Deeply buried underneath his unreasonableness is a very distorted communication that he loves his daughter and he misses her. But saying so would leave him too exposed and vulnerable. The only unspoken clue he offers is that he had put all of her postcards up on the fridge. An indirect gesture of love in lieu of words.
Another example of the family's inability to express f