Review: Scenes from a Marriage

Just an attempt for a serious adaptation of Bergman.

When Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage premiered on Swedish TV2 in 1973, there was a huge response from the viewers. The penultimate fifth episode was seen by 3.5 million Swedes, almost half the population. The story of the break-up of the ten-year marriage of Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman) is partly based on current events in Bergman’s life, the break-up of the marriage with Ingrid von Rosen, but what is more important is that the series emerged at a time of raising awareness of the political nature of family relations. Without engaging into the burning feminist debates of the time, Bergman was then very successful and unpretentious in capturing the cultural shifts that were changing society. As he explains, "the series would deal with the absolute fact that the civic ideal of security spoils people's emotional lives, undermines them, frightens them". Behind the camera was his longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist.

Scenes from a Marriage comes from the image of a successful and happily married couple sitting on a green velvet couch and taking photos for a magazine article. This is the opening scene of the series. Johan and Marianne are a seemingly perfect couple: two houses, two cars, two daughters, and both with careers. They have a perfect marriage, until one day they don't. Through six different dialogues about love, marriage, monogamy and the family, Bergman creates a story about real people and an aesthetically superior work for television. Scenes from a Marriage was also the first achievement in Bergman's oeuvre written and directed for television. After the unexpected success, almost everything he recorded for the rest of his life was mostly for television, whether it was a series (Face to Face, Fanny and Alexander) or a movie (Magic Flute, Saraband).

In today's context, it is a really serious task to remake Bergman. In the 2021 HBO adaptation by Israeli screenwriter and director Hagai Levi (Our Boys, The Affair, In Treatment), the five-part series examines dilemmas from the original and turns the script over traditional gender roles to explore love, hatred, desire, monogamy, marriage, and divorce through the prism of the modern American couple.

Reviewing Bergman again and watching the HBO version, I can't help but notice how much idleness there is in this new adaptation. Mira (Jessica Chastain) is a confident, ambitious tech executive and Jonathan (Oscar Isaac), a professor of philosophy. And here Levi is trying to update the material. Gender roles no longer reflect a strict patriarchal scheme: Jonathan takes over the responsibilities of raising his daughter Ava, while Mira runs a bit more for a career and an affair with a colleague only accelerates the collapse of the marriage. It lacks that sincerity, anger, rage, passion, even though Chastain and Isaac are very solid. It seems that even those scenes that are identical to the original (opening a series with an interview or a cult scene in a double bed) exist on their own, without any significance for the further development of the story.

For today’s viewers, this "translation" of Bergman and the story of the breakup of marriage in the 21st century is not a revelation or even less a shock. The series, which is almost entirely shot in interiors and relies solely on dialogue between the protagonists, should be little more than a 2021 setup in the Boston suburbs to intrigue the viewer. Although gender roles have changed, Levi's perspective is distinctly masculine and this new reading of Scenes from a Marriage could be (or should be) from a woman's point of view.

Unlike Bergman, he is unable to imagine a female character with convincing inner logic. Levi holds to American culture and his Israeli origins through the character of Jonathan who was an orthodox Jew before his marriage to Mira. Again, these are just some clues to further conflict that are very poorly worked out. And there was a lot of material and Bergman’s legacy to really be a serious television product. Like this, it is another average series.

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Elena Koprtla is from Skopje, Macedonia and currently living in Zagreb, Croatia. She has a PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. She has worked in the cultural editorial board of several media channels in Macedonia, as a book editor and coordinator for an art festival.