Broken flowers

The New York writer Noah Solloway (Dominic West from the “wiretapping” HBO ), together with his wife and four children, is going to spend the summer in Montok-a resort town on Long Island. The place was removed so that even sand and sea are able to inspire thoughts about suicide, and the tie promises that Nobric will certainly have such thoughts. Because the first novel did not bring him any special glory or money, and the second had to be squeezed out by the letter. Because the father -in -law, who has to live the summer, as luck would have it, a successful and rich writer. Because the children are uncontrollable and jokes for the sake of climbing into a loop, and the wife, due to which he began to get used to living, will sometimes laugh during sex.

At the other end of the plot is the local waitress Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson from Luther), who lost his son when he was four years old. The husband coped with the loss faster than the heroine would like. The work of the pediatrician had to be exchanged for a race with the attached boss. In it, Alison met Neva-a large, smiling, with a cheerful wife and a bunch of noisy children under his arm. In any case, it seemed to her so.

“Lovers” ( “The Affair” , available in the online service “Amediatek” )-a series of diverging paths: in fact, his heroes several years later sit at cross-interrogation in the police and tell their version of those summer events. Noah seems that Alison flirted with him from the first seconds; To her-that this visiting was originally obsessed with someone to sleep with someone. Each series is divided into two parts: a man confesses in one, in the other a woman. Their testimonies contradict each other in everything, but the most interesting discrepancies are how the same families look from the inside and outside. Noah and Alison, which seem to be relatives in their misfortunes (no matter how the first lines of the main novel about treason are warned of the opposite), actually live in parallel dimensions. And when their worlds still intersect, it is like a car accident. Therefore, a detective, investigating someone's death, appears in the frame.

To release a series in which a black inquiry officer takes turns forcing two heroes to dig in his past, in 2014 it seems impudent - as if there was no “real detective”. Even worse than the positions of the "lovers" look, given that the "disappeared" Fincher is still in the box office, the storytellers in which are exemplaryly unreliable. But the new series is repelled from more significant cultural quantities. He steals the structure of the narrative at Rasomon, he dissects the feelings of the heroes with the cold fatalism of the “5x2” ozone, and explores family life as if he had a thousand pages of the great American (or Russian) novel ahead.

Entering the history of a detective arbitrator (it is funny that the authors of the Russian “demons” made the same move more recently and thus equalizing treason to the crime before society, the series inevitably sets up looking for an answer to the notorious question: “Cui bono?” Both heroes by the beginning of the story went to the bottom for so long that oxygen to surfacing only one would clearly have enough - and even then if both crushes the pressure of the atmosphere. Therefore, in the series, the principle of adversariality of the parties quickly begins to work, and lovers slander each other and divide the audience into two camps. At the same time in a vulnerable situation: his testimony is always the first to go. And Alison is forced to react, and therefore she has less time for her own story. Since the actor and actress did not know the best duet of the actor and actress (including in the “Masters of Sex” all the same showTime ), to choose who to root for, here is not easy. This is the unconditional merit of the casting: in Dominica West and Ruth Wilson there is not a drop of Hollywood beauty, but energy over the edge. They are absolutely earthly people from flesh and blood. Especially the flesh.

There should be nothing public in stories about sex (except houses).

The first two episodes of the “lovers” are impeccable in creating a romantic tension, but in the third, the common mistake of all soap opera about infidelity is made. The scriptwriters suddenly rhyme the internal family affairs of the heroes with the external - of course, criminal - the plot. A year ago, this mistake was worth the broadcast of the “treason” of the ABC channel, in which the murder of the third character turned the heroes into Romeo and Juliet. “Lovers” in the third episode also give their sufferers a rest and switch to city passions. Suddenly, in a sleepy montock, traditions converge in a clinch with time challenges: do not laugh, but there is your own Lopakhin, obsessed with the idea of ​​building a bowling club in a quiet harbor. And Noah, who at one time shoveled the story of the town for the sake of the new book, hints to the investigator that the war of modern hatfields and McCoev smolders here.

These deviations from the line of the main characters will allow to extend the “lovers” not for one season (which, judging by the ratings and reviews, is inevitable), but according to the results of the third series, they seem destructive. It is difficult to understand why the authors turn a private story into an incongruously large drama. Typically, the topic of infidelity in the series works effectively as part of the entourage - for example, as the starting point of the Mudissey Hank Mudie from the "prodigal California" (the main, by the way, the loss of Showtime this year) or as an undeserved (or not?) Spring to the reputation of the knight Ned Stark from the "Game of Thrones". But if the novel on the side is in the foreground, as in “lovers” (in the original - and completely “The Affair” ), then it is better not to pull the blanket with other plots - even if there are pretty and completely naked heroes under it. It seems that this is an axiom: in stories about sex there should be nothing public (except houses). That is why the “dreamers” of Bertolucci never opened the windows, and stopped dreaming only when the cobblestone flew into their window - and fresh air with it.

However, “lovers” are definitely not a story that can be abandoned because of these doubts (they are also likely to be scattered until the end of the season). Apart from the youthful “Society of Dead Bracelets”, this is the only new (not to consider the new “Greispine”) a series of autumn, for which it is worth starting a watch.