Over the Edge

By JAY COCKS

FACE TO FACE

Directed and Written by INGMAR BERGMAN

This is a strange, stormy period for Ingmar Bergman. His well-publicized humiliation at the hands of the Swedish tax authorities (TIME, Feb. 16) led to two weeks in a sanitarium and, currently, recuperative retreat on Faro, his island home near Stockholm. Professionally, his movies have been enjoying, at least in America, their greatest popularity: Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, The Magic Flute have been much honored and widely attended.

All this does not obscure the fact that Bergman is working at less than full capacity. The new films lack the daunting, haunted intensity, the sheer stylistic brilliance of the earlier Persona (1966), Shame (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969). The most recent movies are transitional works, and Face to Face is typical of them. It is a movie that marks time.

Like much of Bergman's canon, Face to Face is about an emotional quest and a spiritual trial. It concerns Dr. Jenny Isaksson, a Swedish psychiatrist who is enduring the same sort of crisis she is trained to cure. Her husband is off in the U.S. at a convention. Her daughter is away at summer camp. Jenny, for company, moves in with her grandparents, who have decorated her room with all the furnishings of her childhood. Instead of reassuring her, the trappings of girlhood seem to hurry Jenny back to a period of intense vulnerability. She is haunted by a presentiment of death, an old crone with a face wrinkled into bird tracks, her left eye a bulging black socket. Jenny, who has taken a lover, flirts with another, a physician named Tomas. She finds herself helpless at work, stricken by malignant anxiety.

Bleak Dreams. Finally she crumbles. Like a coy adolescent, she tells Tomas she will sleep with him -- but just sleep. She asks for pills to ensure her rest, but she cannot close her eyes. She starts talking to Tomas in bed about an incident where she was set upon by two men and almost raped. She found, to her shame, that she wanted to be violated, but her body would not permit it. She laughs, as if to dismiss this confession -- and all it implies -- then, out of control, starts to cry, then laugh again, then gasp through both at once. Soon she tries to kill herself. Tomas takes her to the hospital. There Jenny slips through a series of bleak dreams, fantasies of childhood where she is dressed as a princess in red, gliding, running through reveries of desertion, lovelessness, helplessness.

The movie ends on a note of tentative renewal. If the despair that has gone before seems too familiar, Jenny's fleeting realization that love is the only salvation seems both easy and forced. The scene that brings her to this insight is a tender sickbed interlude between her grand mother and her ailing grandfather, but it is too frail to be entirely persuasive.

Face to Face is about a life-and-death struggle in which neither of the alternatives has commanding force. Erland Josephson, who played the husband in Scenes from a Marriage, makes an intelligent, forbearing Tomas, but the movie belongs to Liv Ullmann. She has never been better. Her Jenny is a definitive rendering of an emotional descent into hell. Many actresses have attempted this, but watching Ullmann do it, we realize how few have done it well. Hers is an intelligent, devastating performance. Ullmann's little smile of unsettled wellbeing, the desperation and desolation of her hysteria, are achieved by applying the most basic and most difficult concept in acting: abandonment and restraint. She reconciles the paradox flawlessly, as only great actors and actresses can.

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