Reinterpreting the story for contemporary audiences, the result is a searing five-part series set in modern-day America, starring Jessica Chastain as Mira and, as Jonathan Oscar Isaac. They previously appeared together in 2014, in A Most Violent Year.
Immediately, the switch-around is apparent. Mira is a high-flying tech executive, while Jonathan is a philosophy academic. In Levi’s version, it’s the wife who has the affair, hooking up with a much-younger Israeli entrepreneur. Her plan is to live with him in Israel and fly back and forth every fortnight to the States to spend time with her and Jonathan’s daughter.
The idea of a woman leaving her family… even now, some may find that difficult to accept. “The interesting thing is, it’s harder for men to see it than for women,” says Levi. When he decided to flip the narrative around, it was a eureka moment. “That was the moment when I felt that I had a good reason to do this remake. For years, I felt why should we remake it? I need[ed] to have a good enough reason and flipping it, it suddenly became a very interesting gender experiment. And it gave the whole story a totally new angle.”
He also made Jonathan a former Orthodox Jew, one of the biggest adjustments from the Bergman series. “It made the character closer to myself because the original character before swapping it…I felt like who is this guy? Such an asshole! And who is this woman who is so weak and dependant? And by flipping it, they became people that I can identify [with] and like.” As Isaac — who is not Jewish — notes, there is “something incredibly autobiographical” about how Levi created the character of Jonathan.
Indeed, Levi identified with the difficulties of leaving Orthodox Judaism, which he did during his military service. “I grew up as a religious person until I was 20. And I felt that I knew something about that. And again, I knew nothing about what kind of inhibition and problems — sex problems or whatever — that you come [against] when you grow up like that.” In Levi’s version, Jonathan and Mira’s sex life has suffered from his past adherence to his faith.
Giving Jonathan a strict upbringing also served another purpose. “I had to find my way into this, and one of the ideas that I had was to bring back some kind of religious background,” says Levi. “But it’s very different. Because the difference between Christianity and Judaism is very much. I think the way I wanted to use religion in this …I wanted him to be like the new man, like a softer man, more inhibited and more complicated, I felt the religious background would bring that to the character. So it was more like a metaphor for the new faith that many are facing these days.”
What did he want to say about the institution of marriage now? “Maybe I should say that marriage is not so much an institution anymore [in the way] it used to be in the 70s. Because what Bergman did is a very direct attack on the institution of marriage. Today, this is an institution that been attacked so many times. It’s not any more like an institution or anything. So actually, I felt that I sometimes should do the opposite maybe by reminding [people] that also separation is very, very hard. Also ruining this institution is really traumatic.”
When he approached two-time Oscar-nominee Chastain about taking the role of Mira, he was nervous. “I didn’t sleep the night before. I didn’t sleep the whole night. I was cleaning the house!” he laughs. But in truth, Chastain was always going to accept this. She’d previously worked with Liv Ullmann, on a film version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and was very familiar with Scenes from a Marriage. Levi praises her deft combination of vulnerability and strength. “And also,” he adds cryptically, “desire but the power to hold…” No question, it’s a titanic turn, a mix of fire and ice.
Levi is at the Venice Film Festival when we meet, where all five episodes of Scenes from a Marriage screened out of competition. Italy holds a special place in his heart. His father, Rabbi Joseph Levi, has family in the country, and though born in Israel, acted as head rabbi of Florence for three decades. Levi’s own path was different; he studied psychology at Bar-Ilan University and, after his spell in the army, went to film school in Tel Aviv. His first film, 1993’s August Snow, even drew on his roots, focusing on religious Italian Jews in Jerusalem.
While he always had ambitions to work as a feature film director, Levi got sucked into television just as the medium was entering its golden era. Never afraid of stirring controversy, his last show, 2019’s Our Boys, was a ten-part co-production between HBO and Israeli TV company Keshet Studios, co-created with Joseph Cedar and Tawfik Abu-Wael, that focused on the kidnapping and murder of the 16 year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Then Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the series “soils Israel’s reputation” and called for a boycott of Keshet Studios.
Scenes from a Marriage may be less controversial, but it’s no less intense — with fiery scenes between Isaac and Chastain. This seems all the more remarkable with filming done under strict Covid-19 protocols, with crews wearing masks and tests administered daily. Intriguingly, in a very meta-moment, each episode begins and ends with shots of the set. You get to see Chastain and Isaac arriving, preparing to get into character, while masked-up makeup artists and others go about their business. Why did he decide to do this? “It was an instinct, I to have to say,” he says. “It was a very late instinct. It wasn’t in the script.”
His idea was to shift the show from what he calls “hyper-realistic reality” to something more abstract.
“It’s about every couple and every place and every time,” he says. There were other reasons too. “It provided a way to show that we were shooting in a very specific time. We’re not ignoring what happened in the world.” When the show was shot outside New York in November last year, the world was still reeling from the pandemic and the isolation that so many people endured during lockdowns and quarantines — a feeling that seeps through the series, which is largely a two-hander between Isaac and Chastain, set inside the confines of their house.
After five hours of Levi’s Bergman remix, audiences will be left punch-drunk. It’s a tough, draining watch, as Jonathan and Mira spend years going through a painful separation. If anything, it shows how a complex emotion like love can leave its tendrils in a person’s heart, even when they want to leave. “Every time one of them says ‘I hate you, I don’t love you’, you think ‘I don’t believe it at all!’” he chuckles. Just maybe don’t watch it on a first date.
Scenes from a Marriage begins on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV on October 11, with all episodes available
