The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-12-16)

December 16, 2021 51

with Amy Herzog) is neither graceful

nor cogent, but if you want to see un-

checked and destructive feelings run-

ning around a room, this is your show.

I have seen Isaac be brilliant be-

fore (Inside Llewyn Davis, Show Me

a Hero), but I’ve not seen Chastain in

any screen role go so deeply mad with

fury, despair, and confusion. When,

in the opening scene, her face is pre-

sented scrubbed clean of make-up,

it possesses the girlish glimmer and

fleetingly jolie-laide aspect of Liv Ull-

mann’s, though not as much as Michelle

Williams’s would have (Williams was

also considered for the part). But in

several later scenes Chastain’s charac-

ter quickly becomes unhinged in a way

that is not of a piece with the rest of the

show. Her performance is not unpersua-

sive, just viscerally startling in a manner

that offsets the glamorous movie-star

sheen she sometimes has trouble shak-

ing loose from her screen work.

Neither series has a conventional

plot: each consists of scenes enacted

around events, roughly one event per

episode: an abortion, an infidelity, a

separation, the loss of a job. The emo-

tional hairpin turns of Chastain and

Isaac involve more whiplash than the

lower-key performances of Ullmann

and Erland Josephson in the Bergman

original, though in this new rendition

Isaac has the Ullmann part of the be-

trayed partner and Chastain the role of

the inscrutable wayward spouse.

Sexual dysfunction is a motif of the

marital conversations in the Bergman

narrative, and the book the husband

unsexily reads at night in bed is Albert

Speer’s memoirs. The sexual drama in

Levi’s series is different and involves

the husband’s youthful religiousness

and inexperience juxtaposed with the

wife’s lifelong habit of adventure. In

both versions, the characters’ garden-

variety selfishness and emotional illit-

eracy are tricked out with weighty and

expert acting.

Neither show judges its couple, since

it is not the married people who are to

blame but marriage itself: Bergman

and Levi land on a conclusion that

is the opposite of Couples Therapy’s

premise that marriage is something

worth managing and saving. In Scenes

from a Marriage, the institution is toxic

with expectations. Why should a person

have to be all things to a partner? “At

work I see people who collapse under

the weight of unrealistic emotional de-

mands,” says Bergman’s Marianne, a

family lawyer. “I find it barbaric.” Her

husband, Johan, a professor, agrees: “It’s

a ridiculous convention passed down

from God knows where. A five-year con-

tract would be ideal. Or an agreement

subject to renewal.” Marianne adds, “I

wish we weren’t forced to play all these

roles we don’t want to play.”

Levi’s series, unlike Bergman’s,

breaks the fourth wall by showing

us the actors arriving at and depart-

ing from the set, emphasizing that

the house is not a home but a stage.

Bergman broke the fourth wall in The

Magic Flute and Persona—is not mar-

riage also an opera (The Magic Flute),

as well as a psychological horror show

of obscure but incessant doubling (Per-

sona)?—but he was wise not to do it in

his television show. In Levi’s Scenes the

broken fourth wall is often uselessly

spell-breaking and mildly ostenta-

tious. Marriage is a performance of an

internalized script! Levi’s choice an-

nounces, but the show’s ideas are often

more complicated than that. (The very

different backgrounds of the spouses,

for instance—one religious and or-

thodox, one not—shadow them quite

powerfully.) The crashed fourth wall,

however, does offset the claustrophobia

of the couple’s house and of the limited

number of locations employed in the

filming, due no doubt not just to Berg-

man’s similarly confining spaces in the

original but to filming in the pandemic.

Both versions of Scenes from a Mar-

riage begin with the couple’s being in-

terviewed for someone else’s research

project on married couples. Levi tracks

Bergman’s series in small and large

ways throughout. His husband and

wife are named Mira and Jonathan,

after Bergman’s Marianne and Johan.

In both series, the couples sit on green

velveteen sofas to answer the research-

er’s questions; both wanly mime their

doomed self-satisfaction for the inter-

viewer. Both later have dinner with

another couple whose marriage is dis-

integrating, and the viewer is asked to

consider whether marital unhappiness

is perhaps contagious. Later, both

women pull a white sheet up over their

faces to hide their weeping after an

abortion. In both series, the marital

homes become characters and exert

their crushing, haunted airlessness,

as well as their eventual sentimental

ability to renew. The attic and storage

spaces, oddly though symbolically,

constitute the sites for a rendezvous.

Both series leap months and years

in a forward rush through time that

neglects to age the characters. In the

final episode of each, one spouse has

a nightmare of reaching for family

members and having no hands, only

stumps. Marriage cannot succeed, say

both of these shows, because it begins

in blindness. It is not the right human

arrangement. And in both narratives,

only after the couple is divorced can

they resume their relationship with

true friendship and affection—though

even then it necessitates lies, for they

are each being unfaithful to another in

rekindling their old love. Adultery, not

marriage, is the true relationship, be-

cause it’s the free condition, the unbur-

dened, private, assertive, unobliged,

and unobliging thing, both series rather

pessimistically insist.

The vision Levi serves (in both senses

of the word) is Bergman’s—one of rad-

ical and free detachment from institu-

tions. One could get into the weeds and

say it is a masculine vision, or certainly

a male artist’s. But it is interesting to

see Levi give this idea (a tad uncon-

vincingly) primarily to Mira, the wife

character, who remains unpredictable

and obscure. Mira rejects so much—in-

cluding therapy—that it is difficult to

know what she would like. A glass of

water, perhaps, without having to ask.

Mind-reading, once more, would be

useful for everyone.

Which is why it is nice to have Orna

Guralnik around. The optimistic arc

of Couples Therapy is a tonic. Couples

have to speak the same language, says

Ullmann’s Marianne, early in Berg-

man’s series. There can be “majestic

silences,” she says, but “sometimes

all you get is the vast silence of outer

space.” Q

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