Word: bergmans
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...Faithless, a character called Bergman (the elder version is played by Erland Josephson, who also knows, as Ullmann puts it, about "being older, being alone, fearing death") sits alone in his study. He is dreaming this movie. In the process he conjures up his old love, called Marianne and played by the luminous Lena Endre, who settles in to offer her reflections on the history they shared...
Comfortably sexy, occasionally angry at the opacity of the young Bergman (played with tight, menacing restraint by Krister Henriksson), she's still amazed at how their self-absorption, matched by the self-destructive, almost 19th century romanticism of her conductor-husband (Thomas Hanzon), leads from the merely regrettable to the definitively tragic...
...Here Bergman has fictionalized or, possibly, is revealing more than he has before. What is obvious is that the law of unintended consequences stirs steadily beneath the surface of Faithless. Its largest impact is on Marianne's nine-year-old daughter, devastated by the breakup of a seemingly contented marriage, who then, of all horrendous things, is invited to join her father in suicide. It is her innocent victimhood--her betrayal by heedless adults--that emerges most clearly and movingly in the film...
Ullmann does not think Hagberg/ Marianne was Bergman's "great love," but was perhaps the first woman "who really fired him up" sexually. What Ullmann does believe is that when his lover confessed her enforced unfaithfulness, "he lost control, and I think that's the only time in life that he lost control, and he abandoned her--I mean completely." To borrow a phrase, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness...
Probably none. But Bergman, who long ago abandoned his anguished search for God in favor of a belief that striving for a high, austere art is as close as we can come to redemption, is here, as Ullmann says, "face to face with himself. I believe he's forgiving himself, doing this movie." She is not, of course, certain of that. But we have, at least, the minor miracle of this intricate, devastating work, passionately involving us in this old man's wintry, unspoken quest for grace...