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Film

Screen depictions of troubled relationships reflect a changing society, writes Caryn James, as a new remake of the classic TV series Scenes from a Marriage premieres.

Some of today's best film and TV series are about the absolute worst marriages. "You hated me!" the husband in the brilliant film Marriage Story (2019) screams at his soon-to-be ex-wife, who screams back, "You hated me!"

"I hate your face," a man says in this year's funny and poignant comic-drama Together. The woman he lives with compares him to cancer and diarrhoea.  

And in the galvanising new HBO series Scenes from a Marriage, a remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 TV classic, the wife is about to walk out the door for good. Yelling and pleading, her furious husband, Jonathan (Oscar Isaac) says they should thrash out their relationship "until we figure out how to fix it". Mira (Jessica Chastain) snaps back, "I'm not attracted to you anymore, how do you fix that?"

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Great, howling cathartic arguments shaped by explosive performances are a hallmark of this new, distinctly 21st-Century screen version of toxic marriages. Clear-eyed and piercing about relationships gone rotten, they reflect an age when divorce is common and long-term relationships don't always include marriage. And they often rely on how the balance of power between men and woman has shifted, at least to some degree, toward equality. In Noah Baumbach's eloquent and nuanced Marriage Story, the wife (Scarlett Johansson) leaves New York to take care of her own career in Los Angeles. The new Scenes from a Marriage flips the genders from Bergman's series. This time it's the wife who cheats, not the husband. The gender swaps don't signal that women – or men – are to blame, simply that movies mirror society itself.

In the old days, on screen as in life, unhappily married couples had limited options, all bad. A man could cheat and probably get away with it, because divorce was scandalous. A woman could stay miserable. She could have her husband killed, as in the noir classics Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), which must have fulfilled millions of women's fantasies. Or she could kill herself, jumping in front of a train like Anna Karenina or swallowing poison like Emma Bovary, 19th-Century literary heroines who have been the source of endless movie treatments. The constant stream of Annas, ranging from Greta Garbo in 1935 to Keira Knightly in 2012, still resonated with frustrated 20th-Century wives. The landscape for an unhappy wife is grim if a romantic escape means sexless interludes with a man in a train station, as in the hugely popular Brief Encounter (1945).

A new kind of marriage film began to appear in the 1970s as movies caught up with the sexual revolution of the 60s and divorce lost its scandalous tinge. A prime example is An Unmarried Woman (1978). Jill Clayburgh's character stands on a sidewalk as her husband dumps her. "I'm in love with somebody else," he says, weeping with self-pity. But she finds a new independent life and romance with an artist (Alan Bates). It is very second-wave feminism, but notably the husband still calls the shots.

The same is true in Bergman's intimate, psychologically probing Scenes from a Marriage (also released in a shorter film version) which follows a marriage's breakup and its aftermath. Liv Ullman's character actually has a career, as a divorce lawyer (heavy irony). But her husband (Erland Josephson), a professor, dominates the household. When he leaves her for a younger woman, she is distraught for months. But by the time he wants to return to the marriage, she is over him. Giving equal attention to each spouse's trajectory, with tumultuous arguments and manipulations on both sides, Bergman's series casts a long shadow over today's toxic marriage stories, with their see-sawing balance of power, complaints about sex or lack of it, and often infidelity that is not the basic problem but the issue that drives the couple to the breaking point.

The new Scenes from a Marriage, written and directed by Hagai Levi (co-creator of The Affair) is a faithful remake in many ways, including its intense focus on the characters' most wrenching exchanges, and the examination of their unbreakable love-hate bond. Through five episodes, it begins by observing Mira and Jonathan's apparently stable marriage and charts their fiery break-up and sexy, contentious post-divorce encounters. The gender reversal is not a stunt, but a detail that adds a contemporary edge. Mira is a successful tech executive and Jonathan a professor, with a lower income and primary responsibility for the care of their young daughter. Those realistic 21st-Century changes allow us to enter their world and emotional lives more fully.

They say deliberately hurtful things that might be unforgivable. But they are also relatable things we have all said, or wanted to say, or knew we'd never dare say out loud

We are led to see Mira as selfish and manipulative – not because she wants to leave but because of the heartless way she does it. Fair warning: this is a spoiler for anyone who has not seen the Bergman version. Reversing the original, here the wife walks in one night and announces she is leaving the next day with the younger man she has been having an affair with. It's the shocked, wounded husband who pleads with her to stay.

Chastain and Isaac bring raw, visceral emotion to Mira and Jonathan's arguments, which propel the story. "You're a narcissist," Mira tells him. "How are you not ashamed?" he asks her. As in all the toxic marriage films, they say deliberately hurtful things that might be unforgivable. But they are also relatable things we have all said, or wanted to say, or knew we'd never dare say out loud. It's cathartic to watch, often in exaggerated form, arguments most of us either live through or try hard to avoid in reality.  

Soon after it appeared in Sweden, Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage was held responsible for an increased divorce rate in the country. That may be myth, but the series' influence definitely pops up in 21st-Century relationship films, sometimes in explicit homages. Mia Hansen-Løve's elegant, playful new Bergman Island explores a fraught, less disastrous but decidedly 21st-Century marriage between two filmmakers, Chris and Tony (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth). When an artists' residency takes them to Faro, the island where Bergman lived and worked, they are assigned to stay in the house where he filmed the series. "You do realise we're going to sleep in the bed where they shot Scenes from a Marriage," Chris says. "We have to maybe sleep in the other bedroom."

In Marriage Story, Johansson and Adam Driver are Nicole and Charlie, an actress and a director working together in what is assuredly his theatre company. A framed magazine article about them on the wall of their Brooklyn home is headlined "Scenes from a Marriage", a phrase that is never a good omen.

Baumbach's eloquent screenplay starts with a description each spouse wrote about the other. Among Nicole's great qualities, Charlie says, "She could have stayed in LA and been a movie star but she gave that up to do theatre with me in New York." There's the beginning of the problem, or at least an early warning sign. Part of the brilliance of the film is that Nicole's early choices are both believable – we all do crazy things in love, sometimes reconfiguring ourselves – and retro. After she moves to Los Angeles with their son to make a TV show, she gives her shark of a lawyer (Laura Dern) a long explanation of why the marriage broke down. "I had never really come alive for myself," she says, but ends with the droll kicker, "also, I think he slept with the stage manager, Maryann". 

Nicole and Charlie's fierce, hateful argument after they split might be the film's most memorable scene. He calls her "a hack" actress. She says: "You gaslighted me." They claim they physically repulsed each other during the marriage, and – maybe even worse – accuse each other of having their parents' worst traits. It's the kind of fight there's no coming back from, and totally in line with broken-marriage films today.

Middle-class characters don't have exclusive rights to toxic marriages on screen. In Derek Cian's heart-breaking, chronologically-fragmented Blue Valentine (2010), Michelle Williams plays Cindy, a harried nurse and mother. Ryan Gosling is her husband, Dean, drinking beer in the morning before his job painting houses. But they have the same impossible-to-resolve marital issues, the same soul-killing arguments. Cian begins his story at a low point in the marriage, then gracefully moves back and forth to earlier moments when Dean was charming and Cindy was enchanted by him. But as they settle into a mundane life, he drinks and she becomes exasperated. When he shows up drunk and abusive at her job, she is the one who ends things. "I'm done. I'm done being angry like this. I'm done having you drunk like this," she yells, and starts slapping him. They are both in pain, but unlike women of an earlier era, she has a way to move forward.

The bracing Together reveals just how timely and adaptable today's toxic relationship dramas can be. James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan are an unmarried couple with a 10-year-old son (they are the only three actors on screen) trapped in their house during the Covid lockdown. Directed by Stephen Daldry (The Hours) and written by the playwright Dennis Kelly (Matilda the Musical), the film turns its reduced scale to its advantage with a trenchant view of a relationship that was already in distress. As the unnamed characters talk to the camera and to each other, we learn the causes of their anger and discontent. He is a successful business owner and she is a human rights worker, so he has money but she has the moral high ground. They loathe the idea of sex with each other.

As months , the pandemic and grief infuse their lives. They astonish themselves by starting to have sex again. Meaningless, they say, but very good sex. Their arguments are acerbic, sometimes funny and often brutal, as the actors smoothly overcome the artifice of talking to the camera.

By the end, McAvoy's character makes a discovery that feels like a revelation to him and that she harshly guesses he stole from a song. He says he has hated her for so long, but now, "I think there's a chance that we've somehow ended up in this place that is the love that exists beyond hate. And the love that exists beyond hate – not a lot of people get to go there." He's wrong about that second part. On screen in the 21st Century, they often do.

Scenes from a Marriage premieres on HBO on 12 September.

Together is currently streaming in the UK, is in cinemas in the US, and begins streaming in the US on 14 September.

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