THE AFFAIR: Convincing, Unconventional, Worth Your Time!

Regardless of whether you have already watched The Affair or the series is still ahead of you, agree to a little experiment. Do as the protagonist of Knife in the Water… Do you remember that scene on the boat? Raise your right arm slightly, let your hand be opposite your face. Now extend your index finger. Close your left eye, then your right, following your finger with your gaze. Do you see what’s happening?

Your hand is motionless, but the finger seems to wander. When you look through your right eye, the finger, like the needle of a compass, is in a different place than when you glance through your left. The scenery shifts slightly. Blink. What was hidden until now reveals itself in full light. Blink. What you were just looking at disappears from view, the horizon looks different. It’s just a blink, but the perspective changes completely. Perspectives. That is what The Affair is about.

The series has a strong starting point: a corpse. The investigation into the mysterious death of Scott Lockhart becomes a pretext for a journey into the past. Was it an accident or a crime? Who is responsible for the young man’s death? The interrogation of those close to the deceased leads back to the seaside town of Montauk several years earlier. Should the origins of the unexplained death, the potential murderer, and his motives be sought in the town where the lives of two seemingly happy families one day began to fall apart?

Noah Solloway (Dominic West, known from The Wire), husband, father of four, academic lecturer, aspiring writer, a man with an orderly and predictable life, does something unpredictable one summer: he starts a summer affair with the married Alison Bailey (Ruth Wilson, known from Luther), a waitress in a small seaside bar, a woman marked by loss, trying to forget the past.

The episodes of the first season focus on four protagonists: Noah, Alison, and their spouses Helen Solloway (Maura Tierney, known from ER) and Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson, known from Dawson’s Creek), as well as their relatives. From the very first episode, the viewer is confronted with an unusual narrative structure. We watch the same events twice. The same, but are they really the same? Disturbances creep into the image we have just absorbed. Objects, people, and events look a little different, the sound of words is slightly different from what we heard a quarter of an hour earlier…

These are just details, but with time we notice they are not meaningless — quite the contrary. Different perspectives, images, and memories filtered through an individual way of perceiving — this is what the creators of The Affair (the script is by In Treatment co-creators Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem) have served us. For better viewer orientation, it is clearly marked whose story we are watching. A black screen, a name on it, we know exactly through whose eyes we are currently looking at the world. This is already a fairly well-known device, but one we have mainly encountered in literature. A few filmmakers have used a similar convention, but in a series such a composition is something new.

The Affair consists of five seasons, and I am not entirely convinced about the third. Despite the initial delight at the appearance in the production of Irène Jacob (of The Double Life of Veronique, Three Colors: Red), absent from screens for a long time, the third season already seems to be a separate story, connected to the previous two seasons only by thin threads. Noah begins a new chapter, struggles with inner demons. The women of his life – ex-wives, lovers, a growing daughter – are still present but seem to no longer influence the man’s fate and decisions, each of them orbiting on a different path.

The focus of the third season has clearly shifted to the portrait of a man who has achieved success and recognition in the literary world, which he had sought for years, but who has squandered the chance for a happy family life. He let down two women, abandoned his children, focused too much on himself, felt too sure of himself, fell into narcissism and egocentrism, and for a time lost touch with reality…

The plot of The Affair may seem banal. Marital infidelity, a broken family, torn between desire and reason, the consequences of risky decisions, etc. — yet thanks to its unconventional form, the series paradoxically becomes in many ways an original and groundbreaking work. Form and content are intertwined in such a way that one deconstructs the other. And the conclusion — people who say and do contradictory things may both be right. Another paradox.

The Affair is not one of those series whose opulence can make you dizzy, and then with each subsequent episode leave you feeling overfed to the point of nausea. There are no fireworks here, but there is a consistently built story, atmosphere, and convincingly constructed psychological portraits. The unhurried story of the Solloway and Lockhart families is a production worth your time. Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series in 2015.

Well-cast, authentically acted, unconventionally constructed, a series unlike any other. A story that gradually reveals subsequent levels, shows different versions and perspectives, lets you look at the world through the prism of other people’s experiences, expectations, and truths.