Face à face

"Face to Face" exists mostly as a showcase for one of Ingmar Bergman's favorite actresses, Liv Ullmann, and she gives a tour de force performance. She plays Jenny Isaakson, a psychiatrist who can't help herself when her mental illness sends her teetering over the brink into a complete emotional breakdown. The film is unrelenting, comprised of one merciless scene after another in which the camera rests in extreme closeup on Ullmann's face and captures the anguish writ large there. It's a tough watch, but it's also morbidly fascinating. I've always been interested in studies about mental illness, and "Face to Face" is one of the most realistic I've seen in showing how such an illness manifests itself.

Ullmann was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the year that Faye Dunaway won for "Network." The Academy had a tough decision on its hands that year. And Bergman also received a nomination for Best Director.

Grade: A

Jenny has a successful career, a psychiatrist with a future that's clear, but her anxiety, takes her sobriety, overwhelmed with her demons and fears; open wounds born from scars as a child, generations define how she's styled, unable to break, from nightmares when awake, perpetually standing on trial; she's decided to fold and resign, stop the clock, disentangle, untwine, enough is enough, the candle must snuff, the coil must become a line.

Seldom will you encounter a performance as powerful as the one presented by Liv Ullmann as Jenny. Conveying the trauma and terror, the chaos and confusion, the despair and anguish of mental illness, alongside the inevitable pathway to escape, this is nothing short of exceptional.

This movie is nothing short of of a masterpiece of dramatic power and psychological insight. If the mark of a great work of art is that it takes a lot out of you while at the same time giving you a lot, then "Face to Face" is a great film by one of the cinema's (and the theatre's) greatest directors.

During the 136-minute film we are confronted with the spectacle of an intelligent woman's soul being laid bare. It is the soul of Jenny Isakson (Liv Ullmann), a Stockholm psychiatrist, as she finds her confidently professional self-assured hold on the world slipping perilously into disarray. Liv Ullmann is of course no stranger to this type of intense Bergman role, from the mute actress of "Persona" to the defeated wife in the 1974 "Scenes form a Marriage" and in films like "Shame," "The Passion of Anna," and "Cries and Whispers." What a marvel!

For virtually the entire length of this harrowing piece, the actress is on screen, and she is such a mistress of her craft, one feels like reaching up to the screen to embrace and perhaps congratulate her. It is that kind of moving performance. The much-praised scene in which she tells Erland Josephson about an attempted rape she experienced has the intensity of an operatic aria as she shifts moods: bemused laughter, pleading sobs, hysterical abandon. It is hard to see the junctures between each emotion. They meld into an overwhelming emotional experience. This and the other collaborative efforts of Bergman and Ullman have very few parallels in the history of cinema. Some of them might be: Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, G.W. Pabst and Louise Brooks, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina.

Face to face is another example of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's masterful direction in order to penetrate into his actors' psyche. Bergman's sole intention in his movies is to convey the emotions, the interaction between different personalities and how they swift in the film. He uses long uninterrupted takes in such effect that many times throughout the film someone could get carried away and find itself present in the room with the protagonists. It's like Sven Nykvist forgets the camera somewhere recording, but the action continues... Bergman's usual partners are present obviously in Face to Face. Aformentioned cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who by the way has won two Oscars for Bergman's "Fanny & Alexander" and "Cries and Whispers" and was nominated for "face to face", does again superb job. But in my opinion the film is worth viewing mostly for Liv Ullmann's extraordinary performance, mominated for an Oscar as well. There is nothing that I could add, Bergman fans will find the master here in peak form. I hope all film fans will one day discover Ingmar Bergman's cinema, it would be an unpreceded experience. Better late than never...

I saw this with friends when it was first released and twenty minutes after we had left the cinema we realized that no one had spoken. This is a masterful film with Liv Ullman's performance eclipsing any seen on screen. You feel the pain, the hurt and the confusion as you watch this woman's journey. A film for those who like intense, thought provoking and intelligent story telling.