Scarecrow-88
Erland Josephson stars as a screenwriter who, through a muse(Lena Endre, who also portrays the main female character of Marianne as well), summons an extremely depressing tale of the passion and tragic consequences of infidelity. David(Krister Henriksson)is the job-less love-partner for Marianne whose husband, Markus((Thomas Hanzon), travels with his successful orchestra. David is a sad case because he's deep in debt through constant failure--a direct opposite of Markus. Anyone can see Marianne's setting herself up for a harsh existence she just can not pull away from. Marianne's passion for David overwhelms her to the point where she's willing to sacrifice the marriage to a success for a certain failure. David's jealousy doesn't help matters(not to mention he has two children he barely visits at all from a previous relationship)considering his bad debts and mood swings.The truly tragic victim, and the film definitely points this out, is young Isabelle(Michelle Gylemo)who is Markus and Marianne's daughter. She sees the crumbling around her as three people fight, bicker, or do not associate at all. The film's main conflict, besides the adultery and it's effects, is the supposed court case and how Markus wants full custody of Marianne. He doesn't contact Marianne for a long period while also sending social service to check out the living conditions of David and Marianne. Then, after a certain disturbing sexual agreement, Markus allows Marianne to have full custody of Isabelle ending in further tragic consequences. We see that the once joyous relationship of David and Marianne is starting to topple as well.The film's theme isn't fresh, but the performances from the three main actors are. Endre is quite expressive and mesmerizing in the lead female role as she speaks through the varying degree of emotional ups and downs her Marianne continues through because of her decisions. We rarely see Markus, but Henriksson is certainly convincing as David, a man caught in an emotional quagmire often behaving irrationally and emoting certain feelings haphazardly. I feel we should be able to see quite early that this relationship, despite it's passionate, loving moments was never gonna last.
Alice Liddel
'Faithless', as a film experience, is both novel and old-fashioned. Novel, because films like this simply aren't being made today, films that take the length of an expensive historical epic to concentrate on the characters, emotions, words, experiences and largely interior milieux of a handful of people; people who are not grim, sword-wielding Romans or suave cannibals, just fundamentally decent, cultured people capable of horrendous acts for love, in a low-key, familiar, plausible, yet devastating way. It is a film that knows its audience will accept 2 1/2 hours devoted largely to talk and relationships; where anything sensational, like rape, suicide or murder, is kept off-screen.'Faithless' is, however, curiously old-fashioned. This kind of film used to be a fairly regular staple of art-house production in the 1960s and 70s, the heyday of its screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman. A time when an audience with this level of patience and willingness to involve themselves in constructing the film's meaning was quite large and influential. Where carefully realised characters, places and dialogue were important; where subjects like marriage, divorce, grief, death, betrayal were explored in complex, understanding ways that never cheated on them for the sake of a quick ending.Such a throwback is shocking. Even the arthouse alternatives of today have largely forsaken this mode of filmmaking for fear of being labelled unwieldly or -horrors - pretentious. it is not only pre-'STar Wars', but almost pre-post-modern; irony here is a creative tool, not a cop-out attitude. I'm not suggesting that films which privilege character and dialogue over plot and action are inherently superior, but it's nice to see one once in a while.I know they're a hard sell. I desperately want you to see this film, but I can't promise that you'll be entertained or amused. We are asked to watch, for 154 minutes, the relentless dissolution of a marriage and the adulterous relationship; we are asked to watch characters analyse, torture themselves, seek emotional exits through self-pity and histrionics. We are asked to watch the effect of all this on a young child. We have to watch this path lead to some truly shocking climaxes. Even 'lollipops', such as the pleasure of the affair, the Parisian interlude etc., are soured by our foreknowledge of the events and their general outcome, if not details. There is no Hollywood softening through swelling music or redemptive epiphanies. The film's austerity, autumnal/wintry tone and self-reflexive formal apparatus reminds me of a late Beckett play, like'Ohio Impromptu' or 'That Time'. An old artist (in this case a filmmaker), emotionally paralysed for decades having taken the wrong decisions in a relationship through a monstrous pride and egotism, tries to unravel the processes that led him to his current shellshocked state.
The long, painful move towards understanding involves tortuous conservations with ghosts, memories, past selves, all filtered through, and thus compromised by his own subjective ego, his need to explain and expiate. The film we watch is also about the creation of the film we're watching. Self-reflexivity intrudes throughout - the film projector through the window behind Bergman; the characters all in the arts; the theatre settings; the allusions to Bergman's past works; the motif of the 'Magic Flute' magic box etc. - all emphasising the way characters perform and ritualise their genuine feelings; asking us how we interpret testimonies that are, in any case, the wranglings of a guilty man's head.The film is such a bracing reminder of what cinema used to do, you're prepared to forgive its faults - the neatness of the plot, especially, tending predictably towards a harrowing, yet cathartic, revelation. Like Francois Ozon's brilliant Fassbinder adaptation 'Water Falling on Burning Rocks', Ullman's Bergman pastiche cannot fully replicate the power of the original; audiences couldn't handle it, we've been intellectually softened. The climax is harrowing, but contained - think of the true horrors of a film like 'Cries and Whispers'. Bergman would never let us, or the character Bergman, off so easily.But this is Ullmann's picture, and the way she films a scene like Marianne's revelation about her nocturnal plea-bargaining with her husband, or the earlier, squirmingly comic scene where he discovers the lovers in flagranto delicto, have an empathetic, non-exploitative tact that may have been beyond her master.
