Crimes and misdemeanours: Liv Ullmann on Faithless

It’s not hard to trace the roots of Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay for Trolösa (Faithless). In 1949 Bergman began an adulterous affair with magazine journalist Gun Hagberg. (He devotes a chapter of his autobiography The Magic Lantern to describing it.) Hagberg became the model for many women in his films: Karin Lobelius in Waiting Women (1952), Agda in Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Marianne in A Lesson in Love (1954), Susanne in Journey into Autumn (1955) and Desiree Armfeldt in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). She was even the inspiration for Paula in Scenes from a Marriage (1973) in which Faithless director Liv Ullmann starred. “Our love tore our hearts apart and from the very beginning carried its own seeds of destruction,” Bergman writes.

Like their fictional counterparts in the new film, the two spent a few carefree weeks in Paris, watching plays and films, visiting art galleries and restaurants, roaming aimlessly around the city. Then the recriminations began and the affair started to unravel. Bergman became intensely jealous of Hagberg’s other lovers. She, meanwhile, was threatened with the loss of her children if she carried on the relationship. One evening she went to see her estranged husband. When she came back, she was at first evasive and then told Bergman her husband had raped her. He was never able to establish whether this had really happened. “There was probably no question of rape in the physical sense, but she may well have been subjected to emotional violence: if you sleep with me, you can have the children.”

The incident is recreated in Faithless. Here too it helps destroy the couple’s relationship. “Our love was so wounded that it bled to death,” Bergman writes. He and Gun married and had a son together, but soon divorced. She later died in a car accident.

Liv Ullmann acknowledges that Hagberg was indeed the model for Marianne in Faithless, though she too has her own intimate history with Bergman, having lived with him on Fårö, the remote island between Russia and Sweden where Persona (1966) was shot. “[Liv] stayed a few years,” he notes laconically in The Magic Lantern. “We fought our demons as best we could.”

It is no doubt crude and reductive to see Bergman’s (or Ullmann’s) films as romans à clef in which they simply dramatise their own lives. Nevertheless, many passages in their autobiographies bear an obvious similarity to moments in their movies. Ullmann’s account of her life on Fårö in her book Changing combines melancholy, yearning, humour and resentment in a way that can’t help but evoke scenes in Bergman’s studies of fraying relationships. “Perhaps our love originated in the loneliness we both had known… We longed to have no secrets from each other. We yearned for the courage to surrender ourselves… Our needs became impossible to satisfy. That became our hell. Our drama.”

Interviewing Ullmann, you are always aware that she has been asked about Bergman many, many times before. In Changing she recalls an argument on set with Bergman in which he tells her, as she prepares to go to lunch with a journalist, “I am so tired, so tired of you and your damned reporters.” They part in anger, but a few minutes later she’s explaining “for the thousandth time why working with Ingmar Bergman is so fantastic.” That’s her public line, but even as she keeps to it, it becomes apparent their working relationship wasn’t any more harmonious than their private one. She recalls how he once encouraged her to write a film script. “But when he read it, he said it was too personal, that I knew nothing about dialogue. Thereafter Ingmar would watch me writing as if it was a case of intense irritation to him. Even when the filmscript was buried in my desk, I would catch him with that look.”

Faithless isn’t the first Bergman screenplay Ullmann has directed. She also helmed a television movie Enskilda Samtal (Private Confessions, 1997), in which a mother in her mid thirties married to a vicar has an affair with a younger man, also a theologian. While Private Confessions was a chamber piece, Ullmann’s earlier features were on a bigger scale. Sofie (1992), which she co-scripted, was a period piece set in late-19th-century Denmark about a young middle-class Jewish woman forced to marry a man she doesn’t love. Kristin Lavransdatter (1995), a smash hit in her native Norway, was an adaptation of Sigrid Undset’s classic novel. (Ullmann herself had played Kristin on stage in the late 50s.)

Faithless is a throwback to a kind of European arthouse film rarely made today. It’s languorously paced, heavy on talk but with an excoriating emotional intensity. A Prospero-like old man “Bergman” (Erland Josephson) living by the sea listens, rapt, as a “voice” tells him a story. The voice takes the form of Marianne (Lena Endre), a beautiful actress and mother married to Markus (Thomas Hanzon), a successful composer. Almost as a dare, without any thoughts of the consequences, she begins an affair with Markus’ best friend David (Krister Henriksson), a crumpled, charming, curmudgeonly, twice-divorced writer. The film unfolds through the various manifestations of Marianne delving deeper into what happened, as if her story was being dragged slowly and painfully out of the old man’s memory.

Speaking to Ullmann, though, one quickly realises that she had a different perspective on the story from Bergman’s. What seemed to worry and obsess her most was the plight of Marianne’s child, who is caught in the sticky arabesque the self-obsessed adults weave around her.

Geoffrey Macnab: Did you know Gun Hagberg, the woman on whom Marianne is based?

Liv Ullmann: No, but I’ve heard the story for years from Ingmar. I don’t know what so obsessed him about that relationship because he’s met so many women and left so many. He has imparted tragedy in so many lives.

What does he say about her?

What he says hurt him was the time she came home after having been with her husband. He became so angry. That’s what he can’t forgive himself for. My theory is that the jealousy is still cooking within him. For the only time in his life he was confronted with somebody else doing what he’d always done.

Do you understand his feelings?

I remember when I was very young I was with a man and I thought we had the most wonderful sexual thing that could ever happen. We were on an island visiting a girlfriend of his, there were a lot of other people there and I was just so happy. I was walking back towards the cottage and there, under a tree, was my man standing, making love to another woman. I’ll never forget that image and I can still wake up feeling hurt because it destroyed my sense of self. Maybe that’s what happened to Ingmar, though it isn’t what he says. He just says he can’t forgive himself for becoming so furious.

Does he have the right to be angry?

Young people seeing this film say of course he should be furious. She didn’t have sex with her husband just once – it was many times. You can be raped by somebody once, but you don’t go up to their apartment afterwards to be raped again, then sit for a while and be raped once more. And it doesn’t happen that the man says, “Now I want you to have an orgasm” and you’re raped into an orgasm.

You’ve written about your life with Bergman in your books ‘Choices’ and ‘Changing’.

I was once asked to make a movie of Choices, but I use my experiences in everything I do, whether with Ingmar or with other people. In Faithless I use some of my experiences in showing the elderly writer called “Bergman” and the younger writer-director David, with whom Marianne has an affair, and her husband Markus. You can say that all of them may be Bergman, even the woman.

Is there any character in Faithless whom you blame?

You can’t damage a grown-up life. We’ve all had people leave us. When we love people, we’re going to be in for some unhappiness. But if there are children involved that can have a worse effect.

So the child is the real victim?

I couldn’t make a movie that portrayed this woman as a heroine. She made what to me seem such strange choices I can’t feel sorry for her. That’s why I showed so much of the child. The child is the only victim – she didn’t make any choices. The others are unhappy because unhappiness comes with love, but Marianne didn’t really think about what this affair might do to the child. In all Ingmar’s previous films about a father and a mother, the victim is the person writing the film; there the victim is the child because the child grew up and became Bergman and wrote these movies.

How did Bergman react to your placing so much emphasis on the child?

When he saw the movie, he said, “Shit! Why didn’t I think of that?”

How easy was it to work with his screenplay?

At first I felt this wasn’t a subject I would have wanted to make a movie about. It’s so dark and it lacks forgiveness. The first year when we were working on the storyboard was difficult. I said to him, ”I’ll do the shooting in the studio but you can do the pre-production and the post-production because it’s so personal.” He didn’t want that. I said then that it was my film and it would have to be my vision. He said that was what he wanted.

How do you expect audiences to respond?

They can get angry or upset or it’s a catharsis for them or whatever, but they don’t necessarily leave the theatre feeling good. At first you can’t talk, then people sit down and start talking about relationships – being faithful or faithless and what values we have in life.

Do you ever feel sorry for Marianne?

I do feel sorry for her when she’s sitting at the window crying over what she did to her child. But at that moment she’s not crying for herself, she’s crying for somebody else.

What’s the idea behind the music box?

That happened by accident. I was in Paris looking for locations and I went into a shop on the way to the airport and bought a music box – I love music boxes. When I opened it, it played a melody from The Magic Flute. I thought, “Oh my god! I should put this in the movie.” So when I was writing the script I made it so Marianne gets the music box as a gift in Paris and later we see it on Bergman’s table. A lot of people don’t see David and Bergman as the same person, but I do.

The music box has only one tune and suddenly it starts to go more and more slowly. We’re showing Bergman as a much older man and things are going more and more slowly – maybe he feels more compassion, more longing for everything he’s no longer a part of. Fewer and fewer people hear the music box and suddenly it stops, which is horrible. I’m not saying Bergman is like a music box because if there’s anyone who’s active, it’s Bergman. But there are a lot of young people today who have no idea who Bergman is, which is sad.

Is the kind of European arthouse cinema he stands for really in its death throes?

It’s dying out. Young people say it’s like filmed theatre, but they don’t understand what film can be about. They think it’s about quick cuts and camera angles. That’s not film. Film is to help you know more about life than when you went in. It’s not this cut cut cut, kill kill kill, sex sex sex approach.

You must sometimes worry that people will see Bergman as the ventriloquist and you as his dummy.

This movie would never have looked the way it does if I hadn’t been part of it. I know my craft and I know I did it well.

You stage one of the most painful scenes – Markus discovering Marianne and David in flagrante – as if it’s a Feydeau-like farce. Why?

People laugh at funerals because they’re so agitated. The actor who played the husband didn’t even know the other two were laughing. When we came to the close-ups, he couldn’t understand why they were ruining his big scene. That made him more furious, which made him wonderful on screen.

You’ve said that when you were making Scenes from a Marriage, you were all having a good time on set despite the material. Was it like that with Faithless?

We had so much fun. Erland Josephson is a great storyteller and all Lena could talk about in interviews in Cannes is how much fun she had. When you’re dealing with a neurotic tragedy, it’s good to laugh at yourself.

Have women and men reacted differently?

More men than women are upset for the child. They think it’s unbelievable that this should have been allowed to happen. That’s interesting because it’s written by a man who didn’t even think of that. He belongs to another generation where being a father was looked at in a very different way. Today we’ve lost God, ethics, everything, but children are sacred.

Erland Josephson has worked with Bergman many times and here he was playing “Bergman”. Is his performance true to life?

He wasn’t impersonating Bergman, not at all, but he’s known him since he was very young and he used that knowledge. He does things we recognise.

Was Strindberg an influence on Faithless?

Strindberg hated women; Ingmar is more sympathetic. Strindberg would have made the woman more like David and David the poor victim. But they both come from the same root.

How are you regarded in Norway?

They hate me – I don’t know why. But I’m getting so old – I’m 61 today – they’re starting to accept me. My last film as an actress in Norway was when I was 29 years old and it was the biggest success they ever had. I was young and pretty and popular and they could have sold their movies outside Norway when I was a star, but since then I haven’t been offered a single acting part in a Norwegian film. I did one film as a director in Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter, and half the country went to see it. But I haven’t had a directing offer since then either. It doesn’t make me bitter because I’ve had better opportunities. But I’m not a prophet in my own country.

In ‘The Magic Lantern’ Bergman says he’s such a perfectionist that when anything goes wrong his digestion suffers. How about you?

I have a very strong stomach. I used to think that being a perfectionist meant having your own idea and carrying it through absolutely. But you have to see it in the context of the whole world otherwise you’d be completely isolated. What kind of life would you have?

Is Bergman isolated?

I can’t talk for him. I don’t know what he thinks about. He reads, listens to music. He sits in the morning and watches the sun rise. He does things that are life-affirming. Many years ago I did a lousy musical in Broadway. We tried it out in Philadelphia; it was just when that nuclear reactor went wrong. None of us had any idea what had happened because there was nothing more important to us than that stupid musical. I don’t want to be that kind of person.

But isn’t that single-minded drive what you need?

Maybe to be a genius you have to be completely heartless. Maybe you have to make the choice: to be a great artist or to live comfortably with what you believe in. For me I’d rather live comfortably with what I believe in. There are some who are probably greater artists, but it’s no good if you have to tread on somebody else’s soul.