It is not exaggerating too much to describe Hagai Levi as the most interesting series writer in the world right now. Levi not only wrote and directed the psychotherapist series “Be Tipul” for Israeli television, but also her American remake “In Treatment” and the numerous other adaptations in different languages ​​- most recently the French version “Ent thérapie” shown by Arte - jointly responsible as a consultant and executive producer. He is also the inventor of the Showtime saga "The Affair", with which the series format of streaming services achieved the dramaturgical and visual quality of contemporary auteur cinema for the first time, at least in the first two seasons, after which Levi dropped out of production. What a grown-up, bright, non-stereotypical serial storytelling can look like,that's what "The Affair" demonstrated. One can only hope that the saga will not remain the only pattern of its kind.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

It therefore has a certain logic that Levi decided to use the archetype of author television for a remake, even if the idea of ​​remaking Ingmar Bergman's “Scenes of a Marriage” did not come from Levi himself, but from Bergman's son Daniel. And already the first shots show that “Scenes From A Marriage” is not a copy, but rather an independent development of Bergman's great story about the end of a middle-class marriage. There is a film studio, a car pulls up, the actress Jessica Chastain gets out and, surrounded by people with respirators, goes into her cloakroom, where she is being prepared for her appearance. Then she walks down a corridor, a door opens, and suddenly the atmosphere changes. Now there is no joviality, but professional seriousness, the cameras are ready,the decor is ready, the game begins.

Rabid breaking through the fourth wall

Levi's “Scenes”, you can feel, don't want to be nostalgic, but rather contemporary, an eye-opener, no eyebright.

That's why he reversed the constellation from Bergman's Swedish six-part from 1972.

For him, it's not the man, Jonathan (Oscar Isaac), who lets the relationship break, but Mira (Jessica Chastain), his wife.

She works as a product manager, he is a lecturer at Tufts University, both are in their early forties, have been married for twelve years and have a four-year-old daughter.

Apart from that, Levi has taken on a surprising amount from Bergman: The magazine interview with which the “Scenes of a Marriage” begins has turned into a questionnaire for a gender study, but the way in which Mira and Jonathan present themselves as a model couple follows down to the smallest nuances the original.

Levi also stayed close to Bergman in the gradual development of the drama, from the abortion at the end of the first episode and the confession of fraud in the second episode to the fuss during the signing of the divorce papers and the erotic reconciliation in the final chapters. You hardly notice that the remake shortens the story from six to five episodes. In any case, the flow of time is brutally interrupted by the revelation of the studio situation, and just as suddenly it starts again every time Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac enter the scene.