No Way Out
Based on a script by the 82-year-old Ingmar Bergman,
Liv Ullman's Faithless (Trolösa) is a study in
desire, regret, and frightening selfishness. It's
clear that Ullman has absorbed much from her former
director and lover, in terms of technique and
approach: like Bergman's work, Faithless is at once
harsh and beautiful, lucid and dense, delicate and
overwhelming. Apparently drawing again from the same
events that Bergman described in his memoir, The Magic Lantern, the film tells a story of infidelity,
but is less concerned with the act than with its
consequences; it is especially focused on the ways
that guilt and passion weave intricate patterns.
Faithless opens on an island, Faro, where an old man
(Erland Josephson, a member of Bergman's own acting
company) lives alone in a house, all blond wood and
sharp angles, with picture windows that look out on a
grey and lonely sea. The fact that this man is named
"Bergman" in the closing credits is hardly
coincidental, though the character is a mix of what
the filmmaker wrote — as fiction and
semi-autobiography, experience both enhanced and
reduced to coherence — and Ullman's own filtering and
understanding of the man and his self-invention. The
old man is visited by a character he partly remembers
and partly creates, Marianne (Lena Endre, who is
tremendous in the very sort of complex role that
Ullman used to play so brilliantly, in Persona
[1966], Cries and Whispers [1972], Scenes From a
Marriage [1973], and Autumn Sonata [1977]).
Marianne is an actress (which grants her metaphorical
and allusive weight). She's also the nurturing mother
of 9-year-old Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo) and contented
wife of a world-famous conductor named Markus (Thomas
Hanzon). Within minutes, Marianne is telling the old
man how her happy life came apart, and though he
listens attentively, it appears that he's also
anticipating the story she has to tell, as if he knows
it all too well.
The beginning of the end comes when Marianne decides
to have an affair with her husband's best friend,
David (Krister Henriksson), a film director. It's soon
clear that David is also the younger incarnation of
"Bergman," who, in asking Marianne to recount events
from her perspective, may also be seeking explanations
or at least contexts for his own behavior. In
Marianne's story, she and David plan to spend several
weeks together in Paris, thinking that the sex will be
"fun" and remain under control. After their tryst,
which does indeed look mostly fabulous, the adulterous
couple returns to Sweden, where their decision to end
the affair doesn't hold. Tellingly, they fall back
into one another's arms just as David is having a bad
day at work on a play — he is needy and neurotic, and
Marianne loves to take care of him as much as she
loves him. They're found out by Markus. Ugly rages and
recriminations follow, as the film spirals into a
series of elaborate and refined self-flagellations.
All the adults are ripe for blame — Marianne leaves
her daughter with the girl's grandmother until she and
David find an apartment large enough to house all
three of them; Markus refuses to grant any kind of
joint custody; David is mercilessly jealous of
Marianne's vaguest contacts with other men; his
jealousy is focused, of course, on her possible
interactions with Markus, a focus that has severe
consequences late in the film.
For all the havoc the adults wreak on one another, the
film's most harrowing moments concern the child. At
one point Marianne remembers for "Bergman" the moment
when she tells Isabelle that she will have to live
with her grandmother while mother moves in with David
and father goes on a concert tour. The camera remains
on Isabelle's open, anguished face, almost translucent
in the morning light. But the framing scenes underline
the focus on Marianne's feelings, as she engages in a
devastating, extended monologue about her own distress
on seeing Isabelle's "straight little back" as she
walks out through her mother's bedroom doorway.
If not for the specter of the child — who is
traumatized repeatedly, by her mother, father, and
David — it might be tempting to read the film as a
study in gendered differences: both men behave as if
they "own" Marianne's body (and soul), while she is
more inclined to forgiveness and tolerance of their
bad behavior. You might even be able to extend this
reading to encompass director Ullman's generous
treatment of the "Bergman" character, as a man feeling
damaged, guilt-ridden, and not a little self-pitying.
That Ullman's film appears to forgive the character,
or at least to display his misery as if it's enough
already, is both touching and irritating. And frankly,
I found myself wondering, when all the adults had been
accounted for by film's end, what had happened to
Isabelle.
Certainly, the film revisits Bergman's most vaunted
and well-rehearsed themes — loss, culpability, and
remorse. But it also offers up Marianne as his
counterpart, a woman so self-centered and incapable of
self-examination (at least when she's in the throes of
passion) that her capacity to grant absolution is
questionable at best. To their credit, neither Bergman
nor Ullman has shown much interest in easy resolutions
in the past. In this way, the discomfort that lingers
after watching Faithless feels both familiar and
appropriate.
