Roles reversed but couple stays unhappy
Hagai Levi’s treatment of Ingrid Bergamn’s original stars Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain
If the near future of TV is endless reinterpretations and remakes of intellectual property — more superheroes, more Star Wars , a new Fantasy Island , a new Wonder Years — perhaps it was inevitable that the trend would turn to one of the 20th century’s enduring superbrands: Ingmar Bergman.
Scenes From a Marriage, Bergman’s six-part 1973 series for Swedish television (later edited into a film), was a slow, subtle work that made a big noise. Following a couple (Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s former romantic partner) through the collapse of their marriage and beyond, Scenes inspired enough real-life soul searching that it was even credited with a rise in the Swedish divorce rate.
DESCENDANTS
Like many a dissolved marriage, it also left behind descendants. Most directly, there are the talky love-dissection films of Woody Allen, Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach, among others. More diffusely, you can see traces of it in TV series that delve into relationships and psychology, from thirtysomething to the recent Master of None
season, Moments in Love.
Hagai Levi has been producing works in that vein for years, including the Israeli BeTipul and its Americanisation, In Treatment, as well as Showtime’s The Affair,
which applied Bergmanian pathos to a crime mystery. Now the artistic child is returning to the primal Scenes. Levi’s
five-episode update of the series, which begins Sunday on HBO, is a soulful study of intimacy that reminds us of the power of the original but without quite making the case for an update.
Bourgeois Sweden is replaced here by a bourgeois Boston-area neighbourhood; Josephson and Ullmann by Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac; and the stage-like rawness of Bergman’s production by the muted light and design-catalogue aesthetic of uppermiddle-class cable drama.
Set dressing aside, Levi’s major change is roughly to swap the gender roles of the leads. Mira (Chastain), a corporate product manager, is the higher-paid half of the couple, rising in her career and nursing doubts about the marriage. Jonathan (Isaac) is content taking a bigger role in raising their daughter while working mostly from home as an academic.
As in the original, the new Scenes introduces the couple by having them interviewed, this time by a researcher doing a study on monogamous relationships. In Bergman’s version, the husband holds forth smugly while Ullmann’s character is reticent.
DIFFERENT DYNAMICS
This time the man does much of the talking again — some things never change! — but the dynamics is different. Jonathan seems to be working to convince not just the interviewer but also himself that he is enlightened and selfaware, that he values their marriage while having the right intellectual scepticism of matrimony, that their partnership is, in the researcher’s words, a “success.” Mira’s quiet is less a sign of a power relationship than a signal that she has been reaching different conclusions.
The five episodes are not actually titled ‘Denial’, ‘Anger’, ‘Bargaining’, ‘Depression’ and ‘Acceptance’, but they cover the stages of marital grief in much that way. Levi’s scripts (two co-written with Amy Herzog) borrow lines from Bergman’s original, but the voice is distinct. The instalments are play-like, generally involving a handful of scenes that cover a short span of time; the movement comes in the conversations, which shift naturally from banality to flirtation to viciousness to dEtente.
Levi is a deft emotional choreographer, and Chastain and Isaac are the dancers you want executing the steps. Jonathan is a type Isaac plays well, a reflective intellectual with a “need for moral superiority” who holds a lot of resentment and familial-religious angst behind that lush beard. Chastain’s Mira is both more expressive and more controlled; she has less guilt about wanting more from life and love, but she’s more volatile than she lets the world see.