Prices from married life – Weekend – Kommersant
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The BBC One mini-series Marriage, starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker, is much closer in spirit to Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage than the official HBO remake.
Two elderly couples, Ian and Emma (Bean and Walker), return home after a holiday in Spain. At the airport, they habitually, without bitterness, argue about some nonsense: “I had to pay separately for ketchup, can you imagine!” “Terrible sleaze. Have you got me potatoes? “No, they only had chips.” “But you didn’t even ask? I would ask for you! “Look, you ate them anyway. Are we going to fight over potatoes now?”
Then we’ll follow them to Emma’s father, who clearly doesn’t like Ian. And to Emma at work, where colleagues will inquire about their vacation in fake voices and praise her new jacket bought on the Internet. Let’s go with Ian to the gym, where he will be awkward and without a specific purpose to show signs of attention to a pretty girl at the reception, and she will decide that this elderly uncle is pestering her. And so on and so forth. Step by step, like a detective assigned to follow a suspect, like a voyeur clinging to the object of his obsession, we follow a married couple with whom nothing much happens.
Hitchcock once explained to Truffaut that cinema is an economical art, and in order to show that a person left the house, it is not at all necessary to film the whole process: how he got up, went to the door, pulled the handle, went out, closed it behind him. But in the series by British screenwriter Stefan Golaszewski, that is exactly what happens: it is full of redundant details. Whenever Emma and Ian, together or separately, leave the house, the camera doggy-style faithfully stomps along in the hallway for several minutes. But both of them, independently of each other, pick up someone else’s garbage on the street and carefully put it in a trash can – and then you notice: how similar they are! 27 years of marriage is no joke, it’s a long time. But where is the dramatic conflict?
The conflict is hidden somewhere between the lines. In reviews of the series, British reviewers write: “the characters all the time say something completely different from what they really mean” or “unspoken words carry more weight than spoken out loud.” Hello guys, this is such a thing from Chekhov, called “undercurrent”. That is why we are shown for so long seemingly insignificant details. For example, a family dinner: the adopted daughter Jessica (Chantelle Alle) brings her exemplary boyfriend to Ian and Emma, everyone dine dignifiedly, exchanging on-duty phrases, but in the end it becomes quite obvious that another series should be shot about this boyfriend of hers – in the spirit of the famous ” You” is about a serial maniac maniac. Here I even want to intervene and tell her: run away from him, girl, before it’s too late!
By the way, Jessica is black – it is obvious that she is an adopted daughter. But the comedian Golaszewski, who entered the territory of drama for the first time, does not explain anything in advance, he simply shows. For example, in the episode where Ian and Emma are sitting at the grave, the fact that their own son once died of some kind is not served with dramatic anguish, which is indispensable in such cases, but is quietly pronounced in the stream of speech, but this makes the scene become deafening. Here Bergman, for example, was so able to dissect a family issue that from some insignificant and conflict-free marital dialogue it became clear that these people had survived or would still survive some kind of catastrophe.
In this story, in this scenario, everything is so connected that you just have to give yourself the trouble to notice it and calculate the necessary meanings. Here Emma goes to dinner with her boss and is embarrassed to say that three extra pounds for adding avocado to your salad is expensive! (Holaszewski’s characters are always from the poor middle class.) In fact, she could only say such things to Ian – as in the scene where they discussed the additional payment for ketchup. And this story with a jacket bought on the Internet is also very typical. “Where’s my jacket?” Emma fusses, getting ready for work. “Which?” asks Ian, who stays at home because he recently lost his job. “What, I have a dozen of them?”
That’s why Emma tries hard, burns at work, maintains her small but stable career. And that her boss Jamie (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is a vile dude also becomes clear almost immediately from some minor details. In such cases, they say that it is written on his forehead. About Emma, he would later say behind his back: “this terrible old woman and her terrible husband.” You yourself are terrible. Emma cannot know about this, but one day she will say to Jamie in a temper, as if objecting to his slander: “You don’t know what Ian really is. He is a good man!” – and repeat the word “good” again.
And then somehow you take her word for it. The same Sean Bean, about whom we know that this is Boromir and Ned Stark, in this role suddenly becomes completely indistinguishable in appearance from some dusty uncle, of which there are plenty. And he says all the time some banalities, and swears with her because of the potatoes, but sometimes it becomes clear that all this is not serious: “You don’t hear me!” – “Yes, I’m the only person on the planet who hangs on your every word.” For some reason, not a single British observer mentioned Bergman, and in fact the final scene of the series, where Ian and Emma lie embracing, repeats the famous finale of “Scenes from a Married Life”. This story is exactly the same – as Emma says at the end: “I always dig in this world and want to find something, but I find only you.”
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