"face To Face"

a Paramount release starring Liv Ullmann, directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Acting such as Liv Ullmann's in Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face is almost more than people can take. Ms. Ullman achieves something like emotional 3-D. With the camera inches away from her face, her bouts of psychological torment pierce all of one's aesthetic defenses. Other actresses (like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence) settle for showing what crazy people look like; Ullmann has the daring and great talent to show us madness itself.

The movie in which this remarkable performance appears, however, is not so hot–Ingmar Bergman's art is puny compared to Ullmann's this time around. Face to Face presents a psychiatrist (Ullmann) who has a nervous breakdown, dredges up all sorts of terrible, 'universal' memories, and makes various prognostications about Love, Death and Psychiatry.

When Bergman is on one of his dream-sequence-and-philosophy trips he can really be a drag. Shame, perhaps his greatest film, was refreshingly realistic–no dream scenes–and in it Bergman found a way to work his message into and out of believable life situations. The movie had resonance, and whole sections of Shame were as powerful and memorable as parts of Ullmann's performance here. But Face to Face defies belief, in spite of the impeccable efforts of Bergman's cameraman. It's one of those Bergman films which demonstrate a certain intelligence, but also a certain amount of gall.

He gives us dream figures with one eye missing, people nailed in coffins, coffins set afire–all that crap–although there is one very good dream sequence in which Uilmann acts out the primal scream, beating at a door to get the attention of her dead parents, which goes straight to the heart. She makes one believe in her madness so much that one's immediate response is to retreat from it. The usual terms of praise won't do to describe her performance. The old cliches are all that come to a dumbfounded viewer's mind: shattering. sensational, classic, tour-de-force.

Ullmann is all of that, but there's a problem: Bergman's schematized technique makes her performance almost a hollow victory, because the film isn't constructed well enough so that Ullmann's performance amounts to a characterization. One isn't likely to refer to Ullmann's psychiatrist the way one refers to Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels in Klute or Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. It'll always be Liv Ullmann in Face to Face, because it is only her extraordinary craft and what it must have taken for her to produce scenes like that primal scream, her laughter that turns into sobbing, and her final schizophrenic monologue (delivered smack to the audience) which give the film its interest. One feels these scenes had to take a lot out of Ullmann, because they sure take a lot out of the viewer. Our admiration for her talent is total.

–Armond White