Word: ullmanns
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...critics, the film's the thing with which to catch the temper of the times, the state of the art. And at Cannes 2001 some magic was missing. A day before the festival's Sunday climax, veterans were guessing that the jury, headed by actress Liv Ullmann, would award prizes to Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room, Joel Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There, Jacques Rivette's Va savoir (Who Knows) and the first-ever entry from Bosnia, Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land. Worthy films all?but the best of a mediocre bunch. There...
...calls it Faithless, and since he no longer directs films, he has given it to his onetime star and sometime lover, Liv Ullmann, to direct. It is, they both insist, very much her film. Bergman visited her set only once and never intruded on her editing room. Her style is warm, almost glowing, and it makes an ironic comment on a harrowing narrative. More important, her manner may grant Bergman something he cannot grant himself--forgiveness for bad behavior that has haunted him for a half-century. "He wants a woman's vision," says Ullmann, "a woman's experience...
...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...
...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...