Marriage Story: Noah Baumbach mumblecore drama

Love stories on the silver screen can lean on the adrenaline of the meet-cute or the drama of the affair, but less often do they linger on the breakdown – different to the break-up, giving time to discussion and daily heartache in the midst of divorce.

Noah Baumbach made his name writing mumblecore pictures, prioritizing low-budget technique, naturalistic acting and quick-paced and often improvised dialogue. These films tend to sway further towards comedy than tragedy, as with the director's most acclaimed feature, The Squid and the Whale, which earned Baumbach an Oscar nomination for screenwriting.

Now, two years after Baumbach tackled the strain of familial ties with the bittersweet The Meyerowitz Stories, he's focusing on the unravelling of a relationship with Marriage Story.

Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star as a couple (her an actress, he a stage director) working through divorce – one that hopes to be amicable but that ends up pushing the couple to gruelling limits that are both personal and creative. It seems loosely evocative of Driver's work on Jim Jarmusch's Paterson, but with more narrative resemblance to Richard Linklater's romantic analysis in the Before trilogy.

Marriage Story will premiere at the Venice Film Festival this September, before being released worldwide by Netflix. Stay tuned for further plot information and the first glimpses in motion of the film.