'Trolösa' is the second film to be directed by Liv Ullmann that was written by Ingmar Bergman. That Bergman's DNA is all through the film is not a surprise: Ullmann was Bergman's dear friend, former lover and sometimes enemy, and her work -- and personal life -- will forever be linked with Bergman and his style; it's easy to believe that Ullmann learned all she knows about film-making from her years studying under one of the all-time greats. And she learned well, for she is a very fine director.Even by Bergman film standards, 'Trolösa' is bleak viewing. While so many of Bergman's films are about suffering and pain, there was rarely a feeling of absolute hopelessness at their core: the light shone through the darkness in moments of tenderness and beauty, especially in the eyes of his exceptional heroine actor-cum-martyrs, particularly Ullmann herself.There isn't any such redemption here, which features very strong acting from its three main characters (played by Lena Endr, Krister Henriksson and Thomas Hanzon) but no signs of warmth or hope to cling onto: all three are deeply unlikeable and selfish in their suffering. So much so, it's almost a relief when this long film ends and we're rid of them. It's hard not to feel for the actors because despite their talents this was a very tough script to transform into enjoyable viewing, and it largely fails in this regard.The only character that isn't unlikeable is played by the little girl, Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo), but unfortunately her character is so underwritten that she mostly plays the role of mute suffering in the background. And at the film's ending, after we learn that Marianne dies from drowning, we don't even get to find out what happens to the orphaned Isabelle -- her character is discarded like a prop, which, ironically, is how her parents treated her; yet we hear from dull David, who continues to feel sorry for himself, seemingly always finding new ways to be miserable.Considering what Isabelle went through (the messy dissolution of her parents' marriage and resulting instability, her mother and her new lover screaming at each other constantly, her father committing suicide and nearly taking her with him and finally her mother's death by drowning) she probably ended up in a loony bin.The most affecting and tender performance in the film is given by its best actor, the legendary Erland Josephson, star of countless Bergman films, playing an elderly Bergman wrestling with his demons and attempting to exorcise them the only way he knows how -- by writing films about them.

'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.

This is a very long and sometimes tedious story about a woman who decides to betray her husband with his best friend and living the consequences. The movie is partly told in the past tense, as part of a discussion between the woman and an older man. The switching back and forth between recollections and real time makes the viewer often impatient. At first, I tried to sympathize with one or more of the characters, but after the first half, I realized that this was not possible. What kind of a sane woman betrays a loving, sexually satisfying, handsome orchestra conductor of a husband with an ugly, aggressive, egocentric and unsuccessful loser was beyond me. I looked hard, but could not see the temptation. Slowly, all characters started acting more and more irrationally and after a while, I just started not caring about what would happen next, and began counting the minutes. Toward the end, bad things started to happen one after another, several revelations were made, but it was too late for me to start caring.

Faithless, although directed by Liv Ulmann, is undoubtedly a work stamped with Ingmar Bergman's approach to film-making. Equally, however, it is freighted with the pitfalls that many of his pieces fall prey to, and which make him, at time, an extremely frustrating artist. Occasionally, as with the Seventh Seal, one feels he truly is penetrating his subject, delivering a lyrical, profound meditation on the struggle for life and, conversely, against death. At other times, however, it feels as if he is not delving deep enough. Examples of this can be found in Summer With Monika and, to a lesser extent, Fanny and Alexander. The visuals are there, the story, the ideas, but no penetrative insights. Unfortunately, Faithless is marred by the same problem. To watch is like witnessing a pebble skimming the surface of an ocean; each time it looks and seems as if it will break the water and penetrate into the dark sea, it simply glances off the surface and skips onwards.One of the main problems with Faithless is the depth and fullness of the characters. This, of course, is absolutely crucial to the success or failure of a film or play, where there is no omniscient narrator who can illuminate the inner workings of the protagonists. One must rely solely on dialogue and action for insight into the inner workings of the characters, and hence as a means of developing sympathy and an emotional attachment to the events of their lives. In Faithless, the protagonists are never fully developed. Marianne, the female lead inexorably drawn to adultery at the expense of marriage and parenthood, David, her self-deprecating, destructive lover and Markus, her unstable husband, are all depicted as merely reactive, shallow individuals. Since they themselves have no insights into their actions, even when given the opportunity to soliloquise, their actions hold no interest, become tedious to witness, and convey no broader conceptual meanings. The viewer must merely watch them commit deeds without reason, react without reflection, and recall without observing.In addition, the plot of the film is, treated on its own, unremarkable, and covering ground already well trodden, not least of all by Bergman himself. It struck me as strange when viewing this film that a man as advanced in years and as seasoned as a cinematic artist should produce a piece so deeply pedestrian, particularly when some of his prior works have displayed obvious skill, intelligence and passion. Faithless could, irrespective of its bare bones plot, have been elevated beyond the level of mediocrity by the conveyance of a deeper level of meaning, but without this, it is little more than a well-crafted rendering of a familiar story. By no means bad, and certainly better than many films, it nevertheless fails to attain the level of excellence set by Bergman and other masters of the cinematic arts in the past.