Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

bjarias ...it's long, and during the entire time they never really sell the idea why she would turn her life so upside down, pretty much just to screw this unappealing guy (who at the end shows his true character).. ...the David they cast does not measure up to the force that is his lover.. why would she see so many things in him that we just do not....and looking at her facial expression not fitting with the film's pedigree, you get the feeling she may be an airhead.... and the husband's plight being entirely script driven does nothing for the work except to add to the overall confusion....there's lots to like, with almost as much to disparage... don't believe lots will choose to sit through the entire over sized reel once again..

noralee "Faithless (Trolösa)" starts out claiming that it's about the corrosive effects of divorce, but it seemed to be equally about the writer's creative process, how the characters' emanate with little control and take over the artist's life. With a provenance that feels uncomfortably autobiographical, as it's written by Ingmar Bergman, who lives alone on an island like the man who calls forth characters in the movie, and directed by Liv Ullman, Bergman's one-time muse, lover and mother of their child (and the child here becomes a painful pawn).The lead triangle is all in the arts, as actress, director, conductor. Many of Bergman's later works have originated on Swedish TV and I wonder if this did too, as it's mostly tight close-ups or claustrophobic two-person interplays.Lena Endre's face is so captivating that I kept forgetting to read the subtitles, so I missed some dialog here and there.The audience was a bit exasperated at the end, in trying to figure out what was imaginary and what was real and what happened to whom at the end, but I think that's what happens to writers as they leave their work.(originally written 2/11/2001)

tyrohelmer An old alienated writer, in an empty house, on a barren seashore, is kept company by characters of his own making. A profound and poignant statement. This is one of the last scripts Bergman ever wrote.Heartrending. In the end, these fantasms finish telling him their tale and they leave him. When it's over, he is utterly alone. But, at the end, the camera drifts over and reveals the pages of his now finished book. One is left with the impression that though this is a bleak life, it is not one without meaning or value.Beautiful performances.

nunculus On his remote Swedish island, Ingmar Bergman (Erland Josephsson) conjures a character who's a present-tense, fictionalized version of a woman from his past (Lena Endre). It seems that long ago, in Bergman's youth (replayed here in the present day), he stole the wife of a friend--a conductor who ran the orchestras of the operas Bergman directed. That wife, played by Endre, confronts her real-life ex and fictional-life author: "You want what all directors want," she tells him, "A dynamic actor who'll bring life and make sense out of your mishmash." FAITHLESS was written by an 84-year-old Ingmar Bergman--the same age as Saul Bellow writing the not-nearly-as-crusty RAVELSTEIN--and it is his best screenplay since SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE a quarter century ago. The events of the movie's adulterous encounter and its aftermath are far from novel, but the intensity of Bergman's gaze--even as "just" a writer--makes them spellbinding. Anatomizing the cruelties inflicted in the name of love, Bergman swaddles you in that familiar rhetoric that, quite frankly, it is a joy to behold in this debased era: a character actually says, delightfully characteristically, "Loneliness. Alien. Alienation." Wise and fully-grown, FAITHLESS is directed by Liv Ullmann, who has a sure, steady hand with the actors (if not the animals and children). The performances are not great, but what does it matter? This, Bergman's apologia pro vita mia, reveals the author to be, in his own head, unforgiven. I find there to be something deeply comforting in the notion that Bergman, like his colleague John Huston before him, is in no way spiritually prepared for death. Both fellas have scores to settle, reputations to shred.Bergman is as colicky and spoiled as he ever was.