It’s tough lovin’ time
TENSE, BRUTALLY HONEST MARRIAGE SCENES ARE TELLING IN A TIME OF SURGING DIVORCES GLOBALLY
Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage led to a spike in Swedish divorce rates when it first aired in 1973. And – as acclaimed screen writer and director Hagai Levi’s modern adaptation of the iconic series hits our screens in 2021 – there’s been another surge in relationship breakdowns in Scandinavia and across the globe. This time, however, it is not the emotionally wrought drama that is to blame but the toll of Covid.
Levi has made his career exploring angst-ridden conversations between couples in difficult situations and says the intensity and claustrophobia of filming Scenes From a Marriage during the pandemic had added new layers of drama to his story.
“I worked with, like, 100 people, most of them I haven’t seen their faces for half a year (because of masks),” he says.
“This is a really, really crazy and weird situation. So, I think we felt, yeah, in a way like people felt in quarantine and isolation, because you are in this place, there is no out.
“We always felt that we are in kind of another planet. And it took us some time to recover from it in a way, you know, to go back to normal, normal life. So not only was it possible doing it during pandemic, but it also in a weird way inspired us.”
Levi’s first big hit, In Treatment, followed one-on-one sessions between a therapist (Gabriel Byrne) and his patients. His follow up, The Affair, explored the consequences of an extramarital relationship.
His new take on Scenes From a Marriage, starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, charts the disintegration of a seemingly perfect marriage.
The common thread between all three shows, according to Levi, is that they all involve good people doing bad things and the painful conversations that arise because of those terrible choices.
“I cannot write bad people,” Levi says. “It’s something that I don’t know how to do. In most television series today, you see a lot of bad people, or immoral people or corrupt people.
“This is the basic (but) I have to understand why a person would do something and to see the complexity in it, in a sense that almost to justify (their behaviour).”
The original series, which starred Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson in the title roles, had a lasting effect on Levi, igniting his “obsession” filming tense conversations between couples.
“When I first watched it, I was very young,” he says.
“I was 18 and living in small kibbutz in Israel so I was totally innocent and didn’t know nothing about art or nothing.
“So, the first time I watched it, the effect was like just shock.