Scenes from a Marriage — Chella Courington takes on Ingmar Bergman, Lydia Davis, and Virginia Woolf — a short review

Folx of a certain age will remember Ingmar Bergman’s film Scenes from a Marriage — an intense 1974 portrayal of a relationship in dissolution. Liv Ullman gives an incredible performance, as does her co-star, Erland Josephson in this film which was originally broadcast as a mini-series. The film was adapted recently in a HBO miniseries starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Issac, which puts forth another intense picture of marriage.

When we think about marriage narratives, we often expect such stories to be spectacularly emotional, possibly redemptive, and certainly the stuff of ephiphany and catharsis. Drama is key.

But what if relationships were quieter than that? Intense, but in an indirect way. What if marriage were not a zero-sum experience, but rather an aggregate of short moments? Some terrible, some wonderful and some something else altogether?

These are the questions that Chella Courington asks in her newly re-issued autofiction Adele and Tom: Portrait of a Marriage, which unfolds as a series of flashfiction sized chapters. Some of these are very short, amounting to a prose poem size paragraph. Others consist of heated dialogues, which makes sense given that Courington and her real-life husband Ted Chiles, are also playwrights.

This is a work that rewards in small bites (chewing is — hilariously — one of the subjects contemplated here). Courington’s volume asks readers to consider how we might revise the narratives of our relationships, away from the spectacular, towards something smaller, more nuanced. It is no coincidence that Adele and Tom have an argument about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and that one of them slyly mentions the prose of Lydia Davis. Both of these influences are at work here for sure — in the impressionistic memories of Adele’s Southern family, and in the stripped down observations about coffee and medical procedures.

Is this autobiography or is this fiction? Both. Neither. Something else. Courington welcomes the reader to a realm of relationships which inhabit an undiscovered borderland, which we may — when we least expect it — recognize as our own.

Stephanie Barbé Hammer published a poetry collection, City Slicker, and a novel, Pretend Plumber, in 2022. Read more about her here.