Almost exactly a month ago, HBO’s Scenes from a Marriage premiered in the midst of a dreary fall on televisions across the world. The remake of the Bergman classic had opened to mixed reviews at the Venice Film Festival, but with near universal praise of Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain’s chemistry as the troubled couple at the center of the divorce narrative. Still, it had a large shadow to escape — Ingmar Bergman’s original Swedish 1973 miniseries was groundbreaking. Not only was it a critical and commercial success, but, at least according to Bergman, it was also partially responsible for a drastic rise in Swedish divorce rates. The plot, for all its simplicity, was devastating: successful couple Marianne (Liv Ullman), a divorce lawyer, and Johan (Erland Josephson), a college professor, are raising two daughters in early 1970’s Stockholm. The couple seems happy at first, but after an agreed upon abortion, things begin to fall apart. Johan reveals he has been carrying on an affair with a much younger woman and informs Marianne he is leaving the family to join her in Paris for an undisclosed amount of time. The two begin divorce negotiations as they pick up the pieces of their lives, trying to rebuild: Johan with a new partner, Marianne as a single mother. Over the course of ten years, they fall back towards each other, violently clashing and passionately making up. The series culminates with the two, ten years separated, meeting up for a romantic weekend at their old vacation home, sharing their various theories of love, relationships, and the nature of human emotion.
Hagai Levi’s remake almost fifty years later hits most of the same narrative beats, only now the genders of the leaver and the leave-ee have been switched and the drama plays out in contemporary American suburbia. Now, the husband, Jonathan, (Oscar Issac) is the main caregiver to the couple’s one daughter, Ava (Sophia Kopera), while the wife, Mira (Jessica Chastain) serves as the family’s breadwinner. It is Mira, not Jonathan, who has the affair, and who, in the months after a difficult abortion, returns early from a “business trip” to inform her husband she’s in love with a younger colleague before leaving to join her lover in Israel. The timeline is shortened by about five years, condensing the two’s journey navigating divorce, but the intensity is still present. The gender flip adds a new element to the dynamic, as Jonathan fulfills the traditionally feminine role as a deserted, sexually repressed spouse whereas Mira is the liberated cheater. Still, the dynamic rarely dips into the devastating pattern of the original. In comparison to Marianne’s relative passivity, Jonathan is lent a level of gender-appropriate aggression, one assumes not to emasculate him any further than he has been, and Mira’s selfishness never quite matches Johan’s original coldness. While the dynamic between Mira and Jonathan is still devastating, and the premise that it is the man, not the woman, who is now responsible for child care is not as groundbreaking as it would have been in 1973, the new arc is still limited by gendered expectations for mothers and fathers and husbands and wives.
In one of the most notable departures from the original, Mira is much more attached to her daughter than Johan was to his children. Where Johan was blase about his abandonment, Chastain’s Mira is full of that sort of optimistic guilt that so often accompanies our selfish decisions. Whenever Jonathan brings up the effect their separation will have on their daughter, she sheepishly counters with solutions that were obviously made after assuring Mira gets what she wants: yes, she’s moving to a different continent with her lover, but maybe she can fly back every two weeks to visit? Yes, she wants to take the high paying job in London, but maybe her ex-husband and daughter can move across with her and the man she left them for? Johan had no such qualms when he abandoned his family, choosing his new love and a job in the States over fatherhood. but one has to assume that, given Mira’s gender, her character was already at a disadvantage and such a move would make her utterly irredeemable to a mass audience: a man leaving his family is a cliche, one that all women have been taught to half-expect. A woman leaving her family, especially for sexual gratification or for her career, is a cardinal sin.
Even so, perhaps that is 2021 Scenes from a Marriage’s addition to contemporary gender discourse: the radical notion that women can also be selfish, abusive assholes. This is not to say Jonathan or Marianne are completely blameless: Marianne makes very little attempts to stand up to Johan for the sake of their daughters whereas Jonathan wields his closeness to Ava like a weapon against Mira, gatekeeping caretaker duties and, one gets the sense, silently enjoying the deterioration of their mother-daughter relationship in the wake of the divorce. But it is undeniable that Johan and Mira come off as the true villains. It is their characters who have affairs, who leave their families in the course of a single night, and who crawl back to sites of their destruction years later, tails between their legs, asking for all to be forgiven. In the most upsetting scenes of both series, Johan and Mira physically beat their partners for refusing them — Johan kicking Marianne as she lays on the floor, Mira hurling heavy hardback books at Jonathan after throwing him to the ground. Yet, it is still hard not to feel a sense of pity for these pathetic characters, Mira especially. Chastain plays her character with such a precise, physical anxiety that even when she makes the most horrible decisions, you can feel how much each move has weighed on the character (well, as much as it can for someone like Mira), how much hope she has attached to each risk. She is highly flawed and no amount of nuance or justification can take away from the fact she physically abused her partner, but in the months since I first watched both of the miniseries, I am still drawn to her chaos. In particular, just how well her character showcases the illusion of control and stability we assume accompanies certain milestones — marriage, children, age — and how shattering these fantasies so often can drive grown, successful adults to revert back into foot-stomping, cry-screaming children desperate for affection even at the cost of their own self-respect. And, damn, it’s really refreshing to see a woman play this kind of fuck-up.
So often in heteronormative Western culture, despite a vast array of lived experiences, women grow up believing that being a woman means finding a partner, settling down, and growing into wisdom and caregiving. That our selfish and/or destructive urges will fade with time and lived experience, and the messy emotions of our youth will be left behind once we finally fulfill our societal obligation to marry and procreate. We are taught motherhood is something we inherently want, and that even when we don’t, we’ll learn to. We have to. Men don’t have this same expectation looming over them — men get to be teenagers forever, men get points for remembering their children’s birthdays, for sticking with their aging wives, and if and when they do run off, we excuse it by lending them a sense of depth — they’re just a person, they have a lot to figure out, maybe they were never meant for fatherhood. Men are allowed to be complex, messy, and destructive in a way women are rarely afforded in life or in fiction, and that is both my hugest praise and biggest problem with the Scenes from a Marriage remake.
I am not a believer in copy-and-paste feminism in the media — I do not think that reproducing a man’s character arc but making the character a woman is inherently progressive. I do, however, wish that Mira had some of that same blase attitude as Johan, even though I understand why she cannot. Johan, as a man, gets to leave. Sure, the audience finds this behavior appalling — a man leaving his family is always tragic and a selfish decision, but it is also, in many ways, expected. Again, women in particular are taught, by their families, friends, culture, and yes, narrative media — that this is a very real possibility they need to anticipate so that, if and when it happens, we don’t fall apart under the weight of our own grief and our children suffer. Some men, we are told, are not cut out for fatherhood, and sometimes they don’t realize that until it’s too late. Women are rarely afforded such an excuse. So many of us have been forced into caretaker roles from such young ages it is just assumed it is a part of our role in society. A woman who rejects marriage and motherhood is not only rejecting their purpose, but also their responsibility to the human race. “Who will raise the next generation?” we ask loudly, and then in quieter voices, “who will finish raising our men?” Men get to keep growing, but women have to be stagnant and stable.
So, god, it is refreshing to see not just a female character, but a mother and wife, fuck up this bad. To be selfish and cruel like a teenage girl who hasn’t gotten her way, who tried to act grown up and then realized she was in way too deep. Part of me wanted Mira to be even crueler- to not care an ounce about her daughter, the same way so many of her contemporary philandering male characters did not. I wanted the show to be brave enough to have Mira leave and not come back the same way Johan did, to only provide financial support to her ball and chain of an ex-family and chase her career dreams across the globe. Would audiences have hated her even more than they already did? Oh, absolutely. Would it have cemented her as an unsympathetic villain? For many people, yes. But it would have been equal, and maybe in that seeming equality, it would have prompted: why do you hate her more than Johan?
But the showrunners knew we couldn’t have that happen, not if they wanted any hope of Mira remaining somewhat sympathetic (again, she nearly busted her husband’s head open with a book that could kill a large rat, but I guess that’s okay?), and so they channeled that frustration into her character. The times we see Mira at her most raw and vulnerable are not when she is fighting with Jonathan over the state of their relationship — with him, even when she is backed into a corner, her teeth are always sharp and bared — but when she is trying to navigate her changing relationship with Ava. We get the sense that Mira deeply loves her daughter, and that she wants to want to be a good mother, but she lacks both the instinct and organic desire to be a caregiver. In contrast to Jonathan’s easy and eager fatherhood, most of Mira’s interactions with her daughter feel surface and practiced, as if she had read the chapter list in a book about how to parent through a divorce. It is never explicitly stated but deeply inferred that Mira, at least at one point, regrets her choice to have a child. She loves Ava, but part of her also views her as an obligation, an anchor, a tie to a life she no longer wants. Yet, she can’t bring herself to say “I don’t like being a mother,” because to admit that after you’ve had a child is so incredibly taboo- but it happens. So much of Mira’s pain comes from not wanting the loss of freedom that comes with motherhood but feeling obligated to stay, and therefore she ends up sacrificing the things she does want — her job, her sexuality, her marriage. She simultaneously resents and loves her child, but she can never admit that. So, she acts out. She lies, she cheats, she snorts coke and fucks 29-year-old hot businessmen on yachts. She tries to sneak in what she thinks are these quick, sneaky fixes to her lingering sense of unhappiness — maybe if she lets herself have this one bad thing, she’ll finally feel different — but she never does, at least, not until her world falls apart around her, and she has to rebuild.
The original Scenes from a Marriage is classic television for a reason: it captured gender roles and marital politics in the wake of the sexual revolution and the beginnings of women’s liberation. It is devastating in its raw portrayal of a relationship inside an institution that, for most of the twentieth century, was very private. Marital issues were not openly talked about the same way they are today, and showcasing such issues on a medium as wide and accessible as television was groundbreaking. 2021’s Scenes from a Marriage attempts to do the same, but ultimately falls short of the original’s greatness. While deeply compelling, it does not have that same, culture-shaking effect, and the times that Levi could have really made a radical point about gender, love, and parenthood (which is offered as the main thesis in the first episode, where Jonathan and Mira are interviewed by a sociology student about motherhood, working, and finances), he shies away. The beginning and ending episodes are disappointing in their narrative emphasizes and how they abandon certain story arcs, but three episodes in the middle of the series shine with intense dialogue and extremely well-crafted performances by Chastain and Isaac (Emmy campaign NOW). So, while I don’t imagine the remake will grace any Criterion shelves or feminist textbooks soon, I still enjoyed my viewing, and will always be happy to add to my collection of stunted, complex, frustrating female characters.
Here’s hoping Ava got a good therapist.
