The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

(EriveltonMoraes) #1
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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