Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac star in Ingmar Bergman’s remake in five episodes available on demand on Sky
How has the couple crisis changed from 1974 to today? What is different about Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, who are fighting today in “Scenes from a wedding” directed by Hagai Levi, an expert in marital traps (“The affair”) by Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson, certainly older, who quarreled under the direction of the master Ingmar Bergman, professor on the subject, in the masterpiece series also reduced to a film version for the halls? Perhaps yesterday’s husband and wife suffered more from the claustrophobia of the atmospheres of literature and Nordic theater that from Bergman climbs up to Strindberg, while the Americans with the child present and interlocutors friends, are agitated in front of the world, make more stops and go, get used to the endless repetitions on the Woody Allen theme.
The 281 minutes signed by Bergman cover seven years of in-happiness of a couple and caused controversy because the usual right-thinkers accused him of putting the roots of marriage at risk, showing how many divorces followed the broadcast of the script, exchanging cause for effect as always. But the author of the “Seventh Seal” and “The Adulteress” and many comedies on the theme of betrayal, a great expert on domestic crises experienced firsthand with many of his best actresses, even shot a sequel before he died, ” Sarabanda », in 2003.
Now the American HBO movie, available on Sky on demand and streaming on NOW, it consists of five one-hour episodes, as if it were a boxing match and in the ring there are a man and a woman who loved and hated each other, as the ancient Latin poets already knew, and who did not they know how to decide whether to leave or not because they are kissed by the woodworm of the memory that they do not know if it is heavenly or hell. From this material, sometimes incandescent and sometimes almost funny due to the rate of identification, a theatrical show was also drawn that in Italy saw a real couple on stage, Lavia and Guerritore, who then broke up but perhaps not through fault of the pointed and cutting words of Bergman’s script.
Almost 50 years have passed and in Italy at least conjugal things they have changed a lot, with divorce and women’s independence; in America the leap seems less long but certainly things are a little different today. It’s a beautiful piece of humanity laid bare by a text that continually goes from gross to net and back again by an amazing couple of actors who are friends in life and have had to become lovers on set, with more embarrassment than usual because love and sex are precisely the protagonists of this endless discussion in which, however, divorce is certainly no longer a taboo. The five acts, approved by the Bergman family, are faithfully written from the original and above all reproduce doubt, now that divorce is a practice in use and certainly one series does not undermine the institution. There are things, says Chastain, that today need to be emphasized such as the economic power and self-employment of women, in the foreground here, while parenting roles have also changed over time and become more interchangeable. But what remains eternal, and it is the beauty of this story that aims at the eternity of feelings and above all at their ambiguity, a primordial resource.
It is true that everyone has happy or unhappy moments, which do not always match and the two actors are extraordinarily committed to making situations and atmospheres true, even if at the end with a masterful Brechtian stroke, the fiction of the cinema presents the bill. Love is a matter in the making, especially when it is forced into the cage of an institution and in these Scenes, also thanks to the little daughter, the knots come to a head, but without ever a shadow of judgment and blackmail towards the characters filled in by the two actors with an infinite variety of even imperceptible shades. Compared to Bergman’s film, these two spouses in crisis who tell each other affections and betrayals and then still have sex, cuddle and then argue, are less isolated from the world, less Nordic, without fjords but with the US neon landscapes behind them. Which are the paintings of Hopper to be the background to an existential loneliness that is still in part a new material for a certain type of cinema and seriality, where the Word reigns supreme.
November 3, 2021 (change November 3, 2021 | 07:25)
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