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http://www.dreamstarlets.com/lobby/main ... hless.htmlOn his remote Swedish island, Ingmar Bergman (Erland Josephsson) conjures a character who's a present-tense, fictionalized version of a woman from his past (Lena Endre). It seems that long ago, in Bergman's youth (replayed here in the present day), he stole the wife of a friend--a conductor who ran the orchestras of the operas Bergman directed. That wife, played by Endre, confronts her real-life ex and fictional-life author: "You want what all directors want," she tells him, "A dynamic actor who'll bring life and make sense out of your mishmash."
FAITHLESS was written by an 84-year-old Ingmar Bergman--the same age as Saul Bellow writing the not-nearly-as-crusty RAVELSTEIN--and it is his best screenplay since SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE a quarter century ago.
The events of the movie's adulterous encounter and its aftermath are far from novel, but the intensity of Bergman's gaze--even as "just" a writer--makes them spellbinding. Anatomizing the cruelties inflicted in the name of love, Bergman swaddles you in that familiar rhetoric that, quite frankly, it is a joy to behold in this debased era: a character actually says, delightfully characteristically, "Loneliness. Alien. Alienation."
Wise and fully-grown, FAITHLESS is directed by Liv Ullmann, who has a sure, steady hand with the actors (if not the animals and children). The performances are not great, but what does it matter? This, Bergman's apologia pro vita mia, reveals the author to be, in his own head, unforgiven. I find there to be something deeply comforting in the notion that Bergman, like his colleague John Huston before him, is in no way spiritually prepared for death. Both fellas have scores to settle, reputations to shred.
Bergman is as colicky and spoiled as he ever was.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157122/