FAITHLESS A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2001 David N. Butterworth
*** (out of ****)
Even though I attended film school in the early '80s, I'm loath to admit that I never saw an Ingmar Bergman until *after* I graduated (odd really; works by the great angst-focused Swedish director--"Cries and Whispers," "Persona," and "Wild Strawberries" to name but a few--would tend to populate most film studies curricula). That movie was "Fanny and Alexander" and I loved it. Yet to this day, for similarly inexplicable reasons, it remains the only Bergman movie I've seen (I've seen a few Woody Allen Ingmar Bergman movies but that's not quite the same thing).
As it happens, "Fanny and Alexander" was the penultimate theatrical film to be directed by Bergman. The 82-year-old filmmaker is still alive, living a semi-reclusive life on a remote island in the Baltic Sea and winding down his days with the occasional stage and television directing stint and, I daresay, long walks on the beach.
"Faithless" is the latest film to bear Bergman's name, but he didn't direct it, and he doesn't even turn in a cameo (although he wrote it and *is* in it, so to speak). Erland Josephson plays Bergman as a whiskery, white-haired old gentleman who, as the film opens, is summoning up a muse to provide inspiration for a story he wishes to relate. A difficult chapter from Bergman's own life, it seems--how the legendary director once had an affair with an actress, and how that affair, like a lie once told, spread like a cancer through his private life.
Bergman asked Liv Ullmann, with whom he had worked many times, to direct "Faithless" and the actress-turned-director's take on the story is deep and delicately crafted. In the film, Lena Endre plays Marianne, a 40-year-old woman who begins a casual affair with her husband's best friend, David (played by Krister Henriksson). Since Marianne's husband Markus (Thomas Hanzon) is a world-famous classical conductor and therefore often on different continents, things start out easy and carefree--"perfect"--but soon enough the deceit and the duplicity start to take their toll. Adding another level of complexity to the situation is the fact that Marianne and Markus have a young daughter, Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo).
"Faithless" is a characteristically fine piece of filmmaking with all of the actors excelling in their roles (especially Endre, who plays a women put through the emotional ringer). Rather than choosing a straightforward narrative, however, Bergman uses the somewhat contrived plot device of having Endre's character (as an apparition) help the filmmaker reconstruct scenes from a marriage, and the result is a dilution of the honesty that is served up so well in the central story. It's not enough to spoil one's "enjoyment" of the film, but the structure is occasionally at odds with the emotional core of the drama.
Hats off to the film's screenwriter, however. Bergman's words, even via translated subtitles, are powerful and uncompromising and seem to sidestep many of the clichés found in your standard tale of infidelity. Clearly this is a filmmaker who understands the raw range of emotions that accompany guilt and dishonesty. Once Markus discovers the cheating lovers (since, like the perfect crime there is no perfect affair), he sets in motion a harrowing series of events that test the mettle of Marianne, David, and we, the audience.
I've still only seen the one Ingmar Bergman movie but, after watching the shattering "Faithless," I now feel as though I've seen two.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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