Infidèle

Not to be an elitist, but no one I know is more familiar with the work and life of Ingmar Bergman than yours truly, so when his latest and long-awaited film, Faithless, was recently released, I was immediately eager to see it. And staying true to his promise never to direct another film after Fanny and Alexander, he couldn't have picked a better director for his script than his protege and long-time colleague Liv Ullman. So, what we end up with in Faithless, is a true-to-form Bergmanesque tale that runs a bit too long and has one too many tragedies.

For the most part, the film is pretty much saved by excellent performances, especially the portrayal of Marianne by Lena Endre. The plot is a tangled web of infidelity and its consequences, punctuated with as much heartbreak, pain and suffering as any Bergman opus, and certainly as much as the average viewer can imagine or tolerate. To be sure, Bergman isn't for everyone. But if you enjoy an occasional catharsis, immobilizing intensity and walking out of the theater thinking your life isn't as bad as you thought it was, this film's for you. For those of you familiar with and amenable to Bergman trademarks, you won't be disappointed. There are plenty of long facial close-ups, monologues, ghosts as figurative demons, and a character that represents Bergman himself. This last feature is one of the machinations I feel we could have done without. It adds a character who is not really part of the plot and does little more than listen. There's also a heaviness to the plot that kind of hits you over the head. Major drama is all right with me, and Bergman is one of the best in that genre, but it was dangerously close to the saturation point of redundance and pretension. Nevertheless, for all you Bergman fans, foreign film lovers and wanna-be celluloid asthetes, you really should add this title to your repetoire. Bergman is truly one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and considering his very advanced age, this could be his last outing. Then again...

The performance by Lena Endre was the best I have seen this decade. And the facial nuances of Erland Josephson were superior as well. All in all, the acting surpassed the totality of the movie per se; but, still this is a movie well worth seeing. I wish the US would produce films like this.

Scripted by Ingmar Bergman and directed by his protege Liv Ullman, this film is much closer in spirit to Bergman realist dramas of the '70's than to his earlier expressionist work. Many of his characteristic themes are here: the responsibility of artists, and the hopelessness at the heart of modern relationships are prominent.

It's a deeply melancholy film, the only piece of comic relief is a scene where one of the protagonists is rehearsing a play which is hopelessly overwrought: if cinema is Bergman's mistress and theatre his wife, in this case, she's a wild, psychotic spouse. The movie as a whole is deeply theatrical, though, saved from being stagey by a few beautifully poetic cinematic touches. The acting is wonderful, bringing to a well-worn tale a deeply moving grandeur.

'Faithless', as a film experience, is both novel and old-fashioned. Novel, because films like this simply aren't being made today, films that take the length of an expensive historical epic to concentrate on the characters, emotions, words, experiences and largely interior milieux of a handful of people; people who are not grim, sword-wielding Romans or suave cannibals, just fundamentally decent, cultured people capable of horrendous acts for love, in a low-key, familiar, plausible, yet devastating way. It is a film that knows its audience will accept 2 1/2 hours devoted largely to talk and relationships; where anything sensational, like rape, suicide or murder, is kept off-screen.

'Faithless' is, however, curiously old-fashioned. This kind of film used to be a fairly regular staple of art-house production in the 1960s and 70s, the heyday of its screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman. A time when an audience with this level of patience and willingness to involve themselves in constructing the film's meaning was quite large and influential. Where carefully realised characters, places and dialogue were important; where subjects like marriage, divorce, grief, death, betrayal were explored in complex, understanding ways that never cheated on them for the sake of a quick ending.

Such a throwback is shocking. Even the arthouse alternatives of today have largely forsaken this mode of filmmaking for fear of being labelled unwieldly or -horrors - pretentious. it is not only pre-'STar Wars', but almost pre-post-modern; irony here is a creative tool, not a cop-out attitude. I'm not suggesting that films which privilege character and dialogue over plot and action are inherently superior, but it's nice to see one once in a while.

I know they're a hard sell. I desperately want you to see this film, but I can't promise that you'll be entertained or amused. We are asked to watch, for 154 minutes, the relentless dissolution of a marriage and the adulterous relationship; we are asked to watch characters analyse, torture themselves, seek emotional exits through self-pity and histrionics. We are asked to watch the effect of all this on a young child. We have to watch this path lead to some truly shocking climaxes. Even 'lollipops', such as the pleasure of the affair, the Parisian interlude etc., are soured by our foreknowledge of the events and their general outcome, if not details. There is no Hollywood softening through swelling music or redemptive epiphanies. The film's austerity, autumnal/wintry tone and self-reflexive formal apparatus reminds me of a late Beckett play, like'Ohio Impromptu' or 'That Time'. An old artist (in this case a filmmaker), emotionally paralysed for decades having taken the wrong decisions in a relationship through a monstrous pride and egotism, tries to unravel the processes that led him to his current shellshocked state.

The long, painful move towards understanding involves tortuous conservations with ghosts, memories, past selves, all filtered through, and thus compromised by his own subjective ego, his need to explain and expiate. The film we watch is also about the creation of the film we're watching. Self-reflexivity intrudes throughout - the film projector through the window behind Bergman; the characters all in the arts; the theatre settings; the allusions to Bergman's past works; the motif of the 'Magic Flute' magic box etc. - all emphasising the way characters perform and ritualise their genuine feelings; asking us how we interpret testimonies that are, in any case, the wranglings of a guilty man's head.

The film is such a bracing reminder of what cinema used to do, you're prepared to forgive its faults - the neatness of the plot, especially, tending predictably towards a harrowing, yet cathartic, revelation. Like Francois Ozon's brilliant Fassbinder adaptation 'Water Falling on Burning Rocks', Ullman's Bergman pastiche cannot fully replicate the power of the original; audiences couldn't handle it, we've been intellectually softened. The climax is harrowing, but contained - think of the true horrors of a film like 'Cries and Whispers'. Bergman would never let us, or the character Bergman, off so easily.

But this is Ullmann's picture, and the way she films a scene like Marianne's revelation about her nocturnal plea-bargaining with her husband, or the earlier, squirmingly comic scene where he discovers the lovers in flagranto delicto, have an empathetic, non-exploitative tact that may have been beyond her master.

An old alienated writer, in an empty house, on a barren seashore, is kept company by characters of his own making. A profound and poignant statement.

This is one of the last scripts Bergman ever wrote.

Heartrending. In the end, these fantasms finish telling him their tale and they leave him. When it's over, he is utterly alone. But, at the end, the camera drifts over and reveals the pages of his now finished book. One is left with the impression that though this is a bleak life, it is not one without meaning or value.

Beautiful performances.