Directed by Liv Ullman
Written by Ingmar Bergman
Starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon
Sweden/Italy/Germany, 2000
TORMENT
Since I began writing reviews on the Internet a couple of years ago, I’ve enjoyed talking to people about Ingmar Bergman and how his one-month spotlight on the Turner Classic Movies channel was my official introduction to art films. I think of that discovery as some might think of their movie experience in the ‘70s; it was a time of growth and active fascination, and I was so grateful to be seeing films that were changing my life. With each successive movie in the series, I fell deeper in love with this director. His morbid ruminations were reflecting what I was feeling in my life at that time. (I found myself enjoying his comedies like A Lesson in Love less than I did turbulent confessionals like Autumn Sonata.) But, as I’ve grown up, I admire his work less and less; Wild Strawberries, the first Bergman I saw and loved, is overly convenient, and Cries and Whispers, which initially shocked me into a state of adoration, is still lovely but also forced in its frigidity. The three films I still cherish are The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, and one of my all-time favorites, Persona. The film I learned to love was the comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, perhaps his most luxurious picture.
The very essence of the Bergman persona is highfalutin. He’s 82 now, retired from the movies, and working in the thea-tuh, but he has written a script called Faithless (what an awful, pretentious title!) and it’s been directed and brought to the screen by his one-time lover and muse, Liv Ullman. He hasn’t changed a bit as a writer and that’s why I found his film so distasteful; he has stayed the same, but I have not. He’s still hammering away at the old questions – life, love, sex, infidelity – and he’s big on the catharsis but short on restraint. Those annoying soliloquies, perhaps his most obvious and unsavory trademark, are everywhere in his latest. They are so direct and predictable; they are true, clichéd humanity without any creativity; they are right out of 1955’s Dreams and 1978’s Autumn Sonata. The film has thematic ties to both movies and is, especially, a homage to 1973’s Scenes from a Marriage, which starred Ullman and Erland Josephson, who appears in Faithless. This two-and-a-half-hour opus-wannabe, so ripe for plucking and ready to be acclaimed as “honest” and “sensitive,” is about an extramarital affair that brings more agony than ecstasy. The movie begins in a very obvious way, with a quote on divorce that’s completely devoid of perception. Marianne, the unfaithful woman played exquisitely by Lena Endre, stares at herself in a mirror in one scene and whispers, “It’s like a cancer!” the way Ingrid Thulin once howled “It’s all a tissue of lies!”
Bergman’s up to his old tricks, framing the ugly affair and divorce with Josephson’s character, who’s mysteriously named “Bergman” in the credits. Marianne is an apparition in these segments, and the film literally becomes a long, grueling therapy session, positioned as a metaphor for the therapeutic uses of acting and filmmaking. The writer is fixated on his formula; it allows him to stick us with those deep emotional monologues filled with hyperboles and similes packed with tumor imagery. Does the translation of this foreign film from Swedish to English lace Bergman’s words with their self-importance? (The English translations of French novels like The Hunchback of Notre Dame contain similar flowery and redundant moaning.) The patient sits by the window (the setting is immediately sunnier than Bergman’s famous chamber dramas, only to become cold to the touch) and spews these words from her heart and soul to the God-like male director/psychoanalyst.
Endre’s quite stunning and looks her forty-five years; early on, Josephson describes her character as an actress equally adept at comedy and drama, and that’s how she turns out to be. She has a warm laugh and smile reminiscent of Bergman regular Eva Dahlbeck but, by the end, she looks ravaged, barely there, like Thulin with a heart. The cinematographer, Jörgen Persson, is no Gunnar Fischer or Sven Nykvist, but he knows how to frame the actress; her liveliness, intensity, and physicality reminded me of Susan Sarandon’s face and the way it has always expressed a satisfaction with her own power and wistfulness. Endre calls to mind two more Bergman favorites, Harriet Anderson and Liv Ullman herself, but she is neither as naïve or innocuous as the first nor as prissy as the second. One thing Bergman gets right with this character that he doesn’t with any other is a hopelessly human emotional duality – both selfishness and a conscience. But Bergman is overly delighted to construct painful ordeals; he believes in making all these people suffer in order to bring their traits to the surface.
It’s hard not to think of Faithless as Ingmar Bergman’s film, even though he reportedly gave little to no advice to the director. It is, indeed, a writer’s movie, though, like many of Bergman’s films are. But the greatest pleasure I derived from it was thinking about Ullman and Josephson, who were so good when they acted alongside each other; there’s a little nostalgia for me in imagining the dynamics on the set. But I miss the presence of a mischievous fellow like the late Gunnar Bjornstrand, my favorite male actor in the Bergmans; I could never shake the feeling that the man had an arrogant smile hiding under the serious façade, and Josephson has never had that kind of charisma. There’s an incredible lack of humor in the film; all the misery is piled up, one awful event after the other. Ullman and Bergman don’t get us lost in the movie so that we can forget the careful, Greek-like calculations of the tragedy, the way Lars von Trier did with Dancer in the Dark, and so when Marianne is raped by her ex-husband, it feels like Bergman was the one who violated the character. The best moment in the entire movie, and the funniest, can be attributed to Ullman and the actors and is in the spirit of Bjornstrand’s skills as an instinctive comedian. When the husband (Krister Henriksson) steps into the apartment and finds that his best friend (Thomas Hanzon) has slept with Marianne, the friend is naked and very bewildered, making half-hearted attempts to get dressed and refute the obvious. The two adulterous lovers finally surrender to the inevitable and break into fits of laughter and sobs.
The film never pretends that the lovers are really in love, but we can understand their attraction because Endre and Hanzon have an old-fashioned chemistry, and Ullman’s direction is delicate when it comes to the flowering of that relationship. Their affair is a precarious fling; it was planned, not an accidental passion. And in the middle of all this is Marianne’s young daughter. She has no say in it; she’s chillingly silent, like the kids in Fanny and Alexander, and is at the traumatic point of realizing her parents are not perfect or ideal. Ullman and Bergman use her as a device in the film, to shamefully conjure mixed emotions towards the mother. The kid’s so blank and saintly while the adults in the film rattle on about their romantic hardships (one eventually commits suicide), but how does one empathize with either party? Perhaps it’s cold or ignorant of me but I wanted to yell, to them and to Bergman, “Grow up!”
By Andrew Chan [OCTOBER 22, 2001]