Cries and Whispers

By RICHARD CORLISS

In most people's lives, high drama is not an asteroid heading for Earth or a battle on Omaha Beach. It is the agony and suspense in an intimate conversation. Do you love me? Have you betrayed me? Will you leave me? The answers to those questions make the heart soar or sink; they leave lasting marks on the soul, like a trophy or a gravestone. Years later, we look back and think: from that moment, everything was different. Yet movies rarely touch on this form of domestic convulsion. They offer escapism--not just from daily drudgery but from our most exalted apprehensions.

Ingmar Bergman has been listening to, and making, these confessions for half a century--in films, such as The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly and Persona, that define the age of anxiety. And though Bergman retired from film directing in 1983, he has continued to write for the screen, wrestling with his Lutheran God, facing up to his household demons, making them the stuff of astringent artistry.

Private Confessions (known in Europe as Private Conversations, after Martin Luther's term for his version of the sacrament of penance) is the last of a trilogy of films about his parents. All three--the others are the 1982 Fanny and Alexander and the 1992 Best Intentions--were made as Swedish TV serials, then condensed for theatrical release. This film, directed by Bergman's lustrous actress Liv Ullmann, is the finest of the three. It distills four lives into a series of chats, revelatory confessions, between a woman and the men in her life.

First conversation, July 1925: Anna (Pernilla August) tells her uncle, Pastor Jacob (Max von Sydow), of her affair with Tomas (Thomas Hanzon), a divinity student; Jacob advises her to reveal the affair to her husband Henrik (Samuel Froler), also a clergyman. Second conversation, a few weeks later: Anna tells Henrik. Third, a few months before: Anna and Tomas have their tryst. Fourth, 10 years later: Anna talks with Jacob about her marriage and the affair. Final conversation, May 1907: the 18-year-old Anna makes a confession to Jacob.

Two people talking--drama and life in its essence. The camera, manned by Bergman's master cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, holds on the actors' faces as they pour or spit out their lines. The film could lie there, inert and artless as an episode of an afternoon soap opera. It doesn't; it brings old rancors and flames alive. These troubled folks might be your parents, or you.

Bergman is back in the haunted house he built for himself. He sets his favorite obsessions--God and sex--at war in all these desperate creatures. The men try balancing their clerical duties with their clumsy passions. Henrik's first reaction on hearing of Anna's infidelity is to console her, as a minister would a sinner; Tomas kneels before Anna as a communicant receiving the Eucharist, or a child before its mother. Love is a sacrament of which neither man is worthy. Henrik and Tomas are really complementary halves of one weak man: the Bergman man. Henrik tastes the truth as if it were a bitter plum, and the corners of his mouth tighten in rage and impotence.

Anna, whose conflicted intelligence exercises itself in passion (when that was the only outlet allowed a middle-class woman), is more than a match for her husband or her lover. Her passion is as potent as Tomas' guilt or Henrik's rage. She can plan an adulterous weekend as if it were a state dinner and tell Henrik that "the thought of your seed in my body was unbearable." She can dish out the awful truth or a blessed lie, and her men don't know the difference. Her only proper adversary is a disapproving God.

And her only pipeline to the Almighty is Jacob, who watches her judiciously, lovingly, over the 28 years of this story. Von Sydow, a Bergman stalwart since he played the knight in The Seventh Seal, has graduated to a severe serenity. His face carries all Bergman's hopes and fears for Anna.

Great filmmakers create, or attract, great actors. Bergman's performers, especially his actresses--Ullmann, Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi and Harriet Andersson--have transformed his dour testaments into radiance. August (who will play the young Darth Vader's mother in the new Star Wars film) is an excellent heir to that magnificent tradition. Emotions don't play on her face; they live there in all their complexity and contradiction. They flush into a mischievous grin or produce tears as natural as a summer shower. Her face is a book. Read it for two hours and know the triumph and pain of a strong woman's love.

At the end of the film, the man who may have been her heart's truest desire caresses Anna's face with his large hand. An older Anna looks back on that moment with a smile that understands and accepts everything. For out of these private conversations, Bergman says, something beyond anguish or exaltation may emerge. Something like wisdom.