See Jes­si­ca Chas­tain and Oscar Isaac in HBO’s Scenes from a Marriage

Over the week­end, HBO unveiled pre­view images for a good chunk of their upcom­ing slate of pro­gram­ming, every­thing from a new project for the great Mike White to a relaunch of cult-beloved TV series In Treat­ment. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to movie fans is one minis­eries that sees two titans of Hollywood’s Olym­pus descend­ing to the small screen for their take on a clas­sic of cinema.

A Most Vio­lent Year co-stars Jes­si­ca Chas­tain and Oscar Isaac will reunite on an Eng­lish-lan­guage remake of Ing­mar Bergman​’s immor­tal minis­eries-turned-film Scenes from a Mar­riage, to run on HBO lat­er this year. And last night, HBO offered a look at the first stills from the pro­duc­tion, which con­firm that Isaac will indeed sport Erland Josephson’s sig­na­ture glasses/​beard com­bo, to the relief of many.

The minis­eries places the decay­ing rela­tion­ship between Johan (Joseph­son) and Mar­i­anne (Liv Ull­mann, Bergman’s long­time lover on whom the char­ac­ter was also based) under a piti­less dra­mat­ic micro­scope, prob­ing ques­tions of lone­li­ness and elu­sive hap­pi­ness. A sen­sa­tion when aired in six parts on Swedish tele­vi­sion and a high­brow phe­nom­e­non upon a con­densed fea­ture edit’s release in Amer­i­can cin­e­mas, its pop­u­lar­i­ty was said to have caused a spike in divorce rates through Europe.

The trail­er below sees Chas­tain and Isaac recre­at­ing what may be the most icon­ic shot from Bergman’s film, in which the char­ac­ters sit togeth­er in bed with a great lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal dis­tance divid­ing what would oth­er­wise be a tableau of inti­ma­cy. In anoth­er image, these two fab­u­lous­ly good-look­ing peo­ple gaze into one another’s eyes as if prepar­ing for or hav­ing just bro­ken from a kiss, so those view­ers less com­pelled by Bergman fan­dom will sure­ly find a rea­son to tune in as well.

Work on the series was halt­ed back in late Novem­ber, when crew mem­bers in New York City test­ed pos­i­tive for the COVID-19 virus and the req­ui­site two-week quar­an­tine began for all oth­er per­son­nel. Every­thing appears to have pro­gressed smooth­ly from there, though on fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, the imme­di­ate pres­ence of death would be noth­ing if not inspi­ra­tion for some­one work­ing on a Bergman adaptation.