Scenes from a Marriage is pretty much a one-man show. Hagai Levy has created, co-written (with Amy Herzoc) and directed the five-episode s...
Scenes from a Marriage is pretty much a one-man show. Hagai Levy has created, co-written (with Amy Herzoc) and directed the five-episode series, which is out on Disney+ Hotstar. Levy’s post-pandemic interpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s television mini-series of the same name from 1973 employs a no-holds-barred, anatomical peeling of the marriage of Mira (Jessica Chastain) and Jonathan (Oscar Issac).
It is set largely in one house. Levy makes the light, the sounds, the clutter, the front yard and the scattered homeliness of the setting another character besides the couple who has lived here for years with their five-year-old daughter Ava (Sophia Kopera). Levy upends the gender specifics of Bergman’s story by making Mira, an ambitious and successful careerist at the tech behemoth Verizon, leave Jonathan, a philosophy professor, a former orthodox Jew and primary homemaker of this family.
The set-up is perfect for a moral thriller. But Levy has no palpable agenda in building up to a denouement. Instead, he pulls us straight into the pit where guilt, pain, bafflement, jealousy and tenderness play out. It’s simply unrealistic to expect when one of these emotions set in, and when that emotion make way for another without seeming like it’s jarring. The excellent acting...
