Scenes from a Marriage (2021)
ある結婚の風景（2021）
The Moonlight essay
CinemaScenes from a Marriage and the Conversations That Break Before Love DoesRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
Bergman's autopsy of a marriage, gender-flipped: this time she is the one who leaves.
Jonathan Levy, a philosophy professor, and Mira Phillips, a tech executive, live with their young daughter, Ava, in a comfortable family house. When a researcher interviews them about their marriage, they sound content and careful. Over dinner their friends Kate and Peter, whose open marriage is fraying, fight in front of them. That night in bed Mira tells Jonathan that she is pregnant. They go back and forth, talk themselves into having the baby, then change their minds. At the clinic Jonathan cannot sit still, and afterwards Mira asks to be alone and cries.
Some time later Jonathan is the one at home, looking after Ava. Mira drives back through a snowstorm to tell him that she has fallen in love with a man she met through work, Poli, and is leaving with him the next day. They argue through the night. In the morning, when she cannot close her suitcase, he packs it for her.
Months on, Mira visits the house, flirtatious and uncertain. She has been offered a promotion that would take her overseas, and Jonathan rejects the idea at once. He reads her what he has written about their marriage; they kiss, and he stops it. At a later meeting, as he sells the house, she keeps putting off signing the divorce papers. They sleep together. Her job and her affair with Poli are both over, and she asks whether they might try again; he tells her he has moved on. When he tries to leave, they come to blows, and she signs just as the movers arrive.
Some years later, after the death of Jonathan's father, they are secretly lovers again. Jonathan is remarried, to Jane, with a baby son, and admits this is not his first affair. He rents their old house, now a holiday let, for the night. They cannot make love in their old bedroom, but they do in the renovated attic, and talk about the divorce as a grief that never ended. He wakes from a nightmare in which he cannot reach Mira and Ava, and she holds him, quoting a line from Bergman's original: in the middle of the night, in a dark house, somewhere in the world. Then someone calls cut, and the two actors walk off the set.
Starring
Oscar Isaacas Jonathan Levy
A philosophy professor and devoted father, left to raise their daughter when his wife walks out.
Jonathan Levy’s story
Jonathan answers the researcher's questions carefully. When Mira finds she is pregnant, they talk themselves into the baby and out again. He is the one at home with Ava when Mira drives through a snowstorm to tell him she is leaving for Poli; in the morning he packs the suitcase she cannot close. Months on, he reads Mira what he has written about their marriage, kisses her and stops it. When the house is sold he wants the papers signed; they sleep together, she asks to try again, he says he has moved on, and they come to blows before she signs. Years later, remarried to Jane with a baby son and admitting this is not his first affair, he rents their old house for a night with Mira, and when he wakes from a nightmare, she holds him.
Jessica Chastainas Mira Phillips
A tech executive who leaves her marriage for another man and cannot quite let it go.
Mira Phillips’s story
Mira tells Jonathan in bed that she is pregnant. They decide not to keep it, and afterwards she asks to be alone and cries. Later she drives home through a snowstorm to tell him she has fallen in love with Poli and is leaving the next day. In the morning she cannot close her suitcase, and Jonathan packs it for her. Months on she visits, flirtatious and unsure, and kisses him. By the day the house is sold she has lost her job and Poli; she puts off the papers, sleeps with Jonathan, asks to try again, and signs only after they come to blows. Years later, living alone, she meets him in secret, calls the divorce a grief that never ended, and holds him after his nightmare, quoting Bergman.
Nicole Beharieas Kate
A friend of Jonathan and Mira, in an open marriage with Peter, grieving the end of her affair at their dinner table.
Corey Stollas Peter
Kate's husband, whose row with her over their arrangement spills over at the dinner table.
Why it matters
Hagai Levi's remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 series keeps its shape, long conversations between two people who know each other too well, and reverses its central act: this time the wife leaves. That single change opens the questions the series actually asks: who does the caring in a marriage, what a woman is permitted to want, and whether a man left holding the child is diminished by it. It is frank, too, about abortion inside a marriage, a decision the couple make together and grieve apart; Vulture noted that the pregnancy and abortion were cut entirely from the 1974 American release of Bergman's original. Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain play it almost wholly in dialogue, and the series keeps glimpsing the film set behind them. It leaves the uncomfortable possibility that two people can be unable to live together and unable to stop loving each other.