`Faithless'.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

There is a telling moment in Liv Ullmann's "Private Confessions" when a woman caught in the guilt and entanglements of an extramarital affair wonders whether to come clean with her husband.

"If I tell the truth, all hell will descend on us," predicts Anna Bergman. Which, of course, is precisely what will happen if she doesn't. In "Faithless," also directed with rare insight by Ullmann, Ingmar Bergman resumes his Olympian and lacerating consideration of the themes in "Private Confessions" (1999), whose protagonist was his mother.

Bergman, 82, is no longer able to direct his own screenplays, but he could ask for no finer surrogate than Ullmann, the star of many of his most cherished movies and a filmmaker of rapidly fulfilled promise. The play between Bergman's fearless and unsparing dissection of the threesome in "Faithless" and Ullmann's perspective is fascinating and rewarding.

In essence, her career as a director allows Ullmann to take a second and cooler look at the kind of dilemma she explored as an actress in many of Bergman's major films.

In their hands, the anguish that is commonly the stuff of melodrama and soap opera is elevated to art of remorseless honesty. As the husband, wife and lover open new wounds in each other, the old ones prove unhealable.

And, as the movie unfolds, it soon becomes clear, these are Bergman's ancient wounds.

"Faithless" opens with an aging writer (Bergman veteran Erland Josephson, who co-starred with Ullmann in the great "Scenes from a Marriage"). He shares the scene with a woman (Lena Endre) who is a muse and a memory rather than a real person. Endre also plays Marianne, the woman at the tortured heart of" Faithless, and it's a magnificent, perfectly tuned performance.