A Tale as Complex as the Lives Behind It

Sweden’s great director Ingmar Bergman has been a man of many muses, inspired by numerous illustrious actresses, but none lovelier, more talented or enduring than Liv Ullmann.

In 1966, Ullmann made her first film with Bergman, “Persona,” and the same year bore him a daughter, Linn, who is now an Oslo-based writer. Eight more films in which Liv Ullmann acted for Bergman followed, highlighted by “The Passion of Anna” (1969), “Cries and Whispers” (1972) and “Scenes From a Marriage” (1973), which paralleled the breakup of their five-year relationship. Bergman, now 82, retired from screen directing with “Fanny and Alexander” in 1983, but has continued writing and also directing in the theater.

After Ullmann began directing and writing, Bergman asked her to undertake “Private Confessions” from his script drawn from events in the lives of his parents, whose unhappy marriage he also dissected in the 1989 Bille August-directed “The Best Intentions.” The result was blessed with luminous performances, with Pernilla August and Samuel Froler repeating their roles from “Best Intentions,” but it was also as oppressive as it was impressive.

With their second director-writer collaboration “Faithless,” which the Samuel Goldwyn Co. opens Friday at selected theaters, Ullmann has scored an unalloyed triumph, vividly depicting the full, wrenchingly painful impact of marital infidelity and divorce. Streaked with dark humor as well as poignancy, “Faithless” has a shattering emotional effect.

On a recent stopover at a West Hollywood hotel on her way to the Palm Springs Film Festival, Ullmann talked about making “Faithless” and about her life today. Her Hollywood foray, the 1973 misfired musical remake of “Lost Horizon,” today yields fond memories of her mentor, Hollywood veteran Signe Hasso, whom Ullmann regards as Sweden’s greatest actress.

Ullmann, one of the screen’s natural beauties, is at 61 as radiant and vital as ever. Accompanying her is Donald Saunders, a prominent Boston real estate developer and hotel owner. Saunders and Ullmann were married in 1985, divorced amicably in 1998 and have remained as delightful a couple as when they were first engaged. Interviewing Ullmann is like catching up with an old friend.

“The film was a very difficult film to make,” Ullmann concedes. “Ingmar had written ‘Faithless’ as a monologue. I developed it into a script, but I never changed any of his lines. He told me he didn’t want to direct it himself and said, ‘I need a woman’s point of view.’ I asked him: ‘What if I do it, and you don’t like it?’ But he was not worried about that and has said that he thinks it is a very fine film.” When Ullmann suggests that “Faithless” may represent Bergman’s most personal work you cannot help but feel that the same could be said of her.

“Faithless” stars Lena Endre as a successful actress, Marianne, married to Markus (Thomas Hanzon), a conductor on the brink of a brilliant international career. They are both 40ish, and their closest friend is David (Krister Henriksson), a film director a little older than they. David, who has considerable charm, has a reckless streak and seems to take a fairly nonchalant stance toward career uncertainties and a messy private life. These qualities make him all the more attractive to Marianne at a time when Markus is increasingly absent and she is facing the challenge of preparing for her next play. A casual fling ignites an unexpected grand passion. The triangle unfolds from the point of view of an older man, called Bergman (Erland Josephson), who lives a lonely life full of regrets on a remote island. As the drama proceeds, the actress in whom he is confiding becomes Marianne, the character they’re discussing. Josephson has often appeared as Bergman’s on-screen alter ego, and “Faithless” was inspired by a long-ago act of infidelity on Bergman’s part.

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It’s easy enough to see that the screen Bergman expresses the anguish of the real Bergman, but Ullmann assures you that the vulnerable Markus and the seemingly glib and facile David are also Ingmar. “All of the characters are him, that’s always the case,” Ullmann says. “I don’t think he would have gone so far as to include the Bergman character in the film had he directed it--but maybe he would have. The daughter was hardly there in the monologues, but I made her more important. I wanted to show how the breakup of a marriage or a relationship affects a child. Erland Josephson’s Bergman is brought face to face with his past. Bergman is really burdened with what happened to specific women in his life. Someday, he may feel that way about his children too.” (Bergman has fathered eight children by five wives and several lovers.)

“Women really have a tendency to believe they can change a man,” said Ullmann, acknowledging that a woman can naively tell herself she’s the one who will be able to tame a rakish streak in a man when that’s the very quality that attracted her. She says women can become conditioned to see life as like a fairy tale--that “the right woman can turn a frog into a prince.”

Ullmann said Bergman was especially happy the film had no sentimentality--he does not believe in forgiving himself, she explained--and he loved that the child was so important in the film. Their daughter, Linn, traditionally has spent summers with her father on his Faroe Islands estate with his other children and told Ullmann he had screened “Faithless” a number of times, which is highly unusual for him with any film to which he is connected in any way. Ullmann took this as a compliment. “I have a really, really close relationship with him,” she says. “We don’t have to sit in the same room to be close to each other.”

Even so, she admitted that their friendship does have its ups and downs. She confessed that only recently she was put out with him over some matter and didn’t call him until Bibi Andersson, her “Persona” co-star and also a favorite Bergman actress, and others called her and said, “Oh, you have to call Ingmar!”

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In spite of the trust Bergman placed in her to bring “Faithless” to the screen, Ullmann wasn’t sure she could pull it off--until she actually became immersed in the making of the film. She gives her crew and cast high marks. “We all really understood each other, and there was such loyalty behind the camera that making the film became so personal for all of us. There was a lot of trust all around. Lena, with whom I had never worked before, was so open. With her it was, ‘Here I am, I’ll do whatever you ask.’ ”

Ever amused by our capacity to deceive ourselves, Ullmann told of going to Cannes last year with “Faithless.” The movie had a raft of rave reviews, and she was so confident it would win prizes that she found herself feeling sorry for iconoclastic Danish director Lars von Trier, so certain he would not get anything for his “Dancer in the Dark.” But it walked off with the Palme d’Or, and his star, Icelandic singer Bjork, took the best actress prize as well. “ ‘Faithless’ didn’t win anything,” she says, laughing. “It was a good lesson: I think of myself as humble, and I discovered I’m not humble at all. That’s something I’m going to have to work on.”

Although “Faithless” has either opened or is about to open all across Europe, Ullmann rightly sees herself as still working on in it, helping promote and publicize it. Therefore, she is not yet looking into a next project, but she does not see herself directing any more Bergman scripts. She has found that it takes 2 1/2 years to make a film and would like the next project, should there be one, to be “lighter, more sentimental, like me.” She says she doesn’t see herself in front of the camera again unless an offer came along that was absolutely irresistible.

“I have my teacup in Oslo,” said Ullmann, which is her way of saying that it is as much of a home base as she has. She has long worked for UNICEF and now concentrates her activist energies on the International Rescue Committee, which is dedicated to aiding refugees around the world. She also serves on the board of the Hilton Humanities Award, which has given its million-dollar prize--”bigger than the Nobel,” she pointed out proudly--to Doctors Without Borders and similar groups.

“My sister, my daughter, my 10-year-old grandson are in Oslo. I want to be available to them. I want to be available to learn something new or to travel or maybe to sit down and just write. Life is short, and you don’t want to keep putting off your availability to others until you say, ‘I’m free now!’ and then discover no one cares.”