A lesson in love

Liv Ullmann's searing Faithless

by Jeffrey Gantz

FAITHLESS. Directed by Liv Ullmann. Written by Ingmar Bergman. With Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon, and Michelle Gylemo. A Samuel Goldwyn release. At the Avon.

Liv Ullmann's last film, Kristin Lavransdatter, was nothing if not faithful to its source, the incandescent 1920 novel by Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset. Faithless, like her 1997 film, Private Confessions, has a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director whose films she graced back in the '60s and '70s. It's not quite Nobel material, but Ullmann turns it into major cinema, 140 up-close-up-and-personal relationship minutes. And whereas Kristin never made it into local theaters, Faithless is getting a deserved shot at the Avon.

The locale is familiar: what appears to be an island, like Bergman's Fårö, with wind-whipped pines and a pebbly beach. The names are familiar: David and Marianne are the protagonists of Bergman's A Lesson in Love (1953), and they turn up often in his subsequent films (notably David in The Touch and Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage), as does the surname Vogler (The Face, Hour of the Wolf). The plot is familiar: 40ish Marianne Vogler (Lena Endre) seems happy with her conductor husband, Markus (Thomas Hanzon), and their nine-year-old daughter, Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo), but then she falls for a family friend, theater director David (Krister Henriksson). What's different is the framing device. The recluse on the island is a scriptwriter named, yes, Bergman (Erland Josephson). Wanting help for his latest project, he conjures muse Marianne, who bares her soul while relating a painful tale of adultery, divorce, custody squabbling, suicide, and separation. In Bergman's desk drawer we see mementos from this story: a guidebook to Paris, where David and Marianne began their affair; the little music box she gave him there (it plays Papageno's song from The Magic Flute); a photo of Isabelle. Does this mean that Bergman is David, that he's reflecting ruefully on the loss of Marianne? Or is this a story he's created from what's in the desk drawer?

Either way, it's a harrowing tale that justifies its opening epigraph from Botho Strauss to the effect that "Divorce penetrates as deeply as life can reach." Marianne is hard-pressed to explain why she left her internationally famous husband (Markus composes, conducts, plays jazz clarinet and piano) and her daughter for the rumpled David, whom she describes as "talented, kind, unpredictable, not many friends, a perfectionist." David is also disposed to self-pity ("I don't trust anyone, probably because I lack self-confidence"), and that clearly attracts her. In Paris, they find sexual fulfillment, but she had that with Markus (who says sex with her is "better than conducting The Rite of Spring"); what they don't find, on screen anyway, is trust and companionship. Instead, we see lots of drinking and the kind of physically violent arguments that mark Bergman's films, volcanic anger erupting in a relationship (and a society?) where too many feelings get repressed. What Ullmann adds is repeated shots of Isabelle cowering in her room, teddy bear clutched tight, a wordless, searing reminder of what such violence does to children.

Indeed, Ullmann is so adept in creating visual rhythms -- the interplay of past and present, close-up and medium shot, normal and reverse -- that I wish she'd written the script. Here Bergman, as is his wont, indulges in talky self-reflection ("I don't have a normal relationship with reality," David worries) that's not always edifying. And though Marianne describes her relationship with David as "a person growing into another person. . . . It's almost biology," we mostly have to take that on faith. Markus, too, gets short shrift. We're afforded brief glimpses of him at work (his podium histrionics at the end of the Bruckner Fifth alone could be grounds for divorce) and at home; there's very little to suggest what his life with Marianne is like and almost nothing to support her observation that he and Isabelle are especially close. Only at the end does he come into focus: in his sadistic proposal to Marianne, in his shocking proposal to Isabelle, in his last shocking act and its consequences for Marianne. Maybe Bergman and Ullmann are reminding us that when only two sides of a love triangle are present, the third will always be a mystery. We don't learn what happened to Isabelle, either.

Whatever, it's Ullmann's film. And she shoves it in your face with close-ups so tight, you can count the hairs in Bergman's beard and detect tiny imperfections in David's chin. Seeing faces this big on screen creates an uncomfortable intimacy that's unusual for the cinema, where we ordinarily go to escape, but Ullmann is suggesting there's no escape from other people -- or from ourselves. In one signature scene we see Marianne mirrored, or perhaps there are two Mariannes, one for each man; eventually Isabelle materializes in the background, between the two images. Another stunning tableau starts with a circle of hands and candles (both Ullmann trademarks) before opening up to show us a chorus of women providing closure for a Greek drama, perhaps Elektra or Antigone. Like Sophocles, Ullmann asks the fundamental questions, like what it means to have faith, or not, in God or in another person. In Faithless, love is purgatory, but, as the final shot of Erland Josephson walking the beach reminds us, being alone is hell.