Ominous Appetites.(Review)

Even though he only wrote it, and didn't direct it, Faithless may be Ingmar Bergman's most personal film. But then, it was directed by Liv Ullmann, who has known him as intimately and as long as anyone. The film deals with a painful story from Bergman's past that seems to have been a thorn in his side. In many of his films, Bergman has allowed bits of it to dribble out, but here he confronts it head-on with an expiating heart. He concentrates on the woman he wronged, a long-ago mistress now dead. Miss Ullmann, herself a longtime former mistress, who contributes much more than routine direction, was the right person to add the woman's-eye view.

Faithless is the tale of the happily married Marianne, an actress (Lena Endre); her husband, Markus, a world-famous conductor (Thomas Hanzon); and David, a stage and screen director, and their closest friend (Krister Henriksson). Out of this true friendship, there evolves a treacherous triangle with tragic consequences. When Marianne gets a scholarship to study theater in Paris, the divorced and womanizing David, on a pretext, joins her there for three weeks of overflowing passion in a small hotel. But the affair continues back in Stockholm, where it wreaks havoc on all involved, not least on Marianne's nine- year-old daughter Isabelle (touchingly played by Michelle Gylemo).

I do not wish to give away a plot full of ominous, even lethal, surprises. But I must state that nobody is entirely innocent here; before two and one-half hours elapse, everyone will have betrayed everyone else with disastrous results, in a story that, like a trick box, has many false bottoms. Still, it is the woman who comes off best: the only one who acts from genuine passion, whose instincts are mostly good, who seems capable of sustaining a relationship, and whose love for her daughter never wavers.

Bergman's strategy is fascinating. The story is told, basically, from the point of view of the lonely old writer, called Bergman, who lives (like Ingmar) on the isolated island of Faro. This writer is going over his diaries, perhaps to write a book; to help him do so, he conjures up the image of the dead woman he calls Marianne Vogler (a name recurrent in Bergman's oeuvre), and lets her take over the storytelling. This memory-Marianne that comes to partly independent life for him says, near the end, "I do not much like your Marianne," adding yet another dimension to the story, another bottom to the box. Indeed, that there are trendily ambiguous counterindications that this may be a real woman impersonating Marianne for Bergman is the only thing I don't like about the film.

Old Bergman is played-largely in grieving, open-mouthed silence-by the admirable Erland Josephson, as the film shuttles between Bergman and Marianne in the present, and Marianne, Markus, and David (Bergman as a youngish man) in the past. Intercut, too, are moments from the Faro seashore, shots of exquisite beauty from the camera of the splendid Jorgen Persson, best remembered hereabouts for his work on Elvira Madigan. One of the film's remarkable features is the preponderance of scenes tightly confined within four walls, yet such is Persson's artistry with light and shadow and shades of color that his cinematography contributes as much emotion as some filmmakers' entire movies. All the actors excel, but the triumph is that of Lena Endre, whose Marianne transcends even what Bergman profoundly wrote and Ullmann magisterially directed. Endre's performance may well be the greatest by an actress ...