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Author:
Sheila Benson
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Sheila Benson was the principal Los Angeles Times film critic from 1981-91, following which she was their Critic At Large, writing on all aspects of the cultural life of that city. She also has written for Cinemania/msn.com for which she was chief film critic and many other papers.
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If critics can be said to have favorites -- and they have -- early on Sheila was a particular champion of independent films, as they were finding their voice and their power. As a result, her reports from the earliest days of Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley and the Sundance festivals found their way into what was then the "Industry"-centric Times.
Moving online, she was chief film critic for Microsoft's invaluable Cinemania from its birth to its death, 4 ½ years later. She has also contributed coverage, essays and interviews to Interview, Elle, Premiere, Film Comment, Variety, the San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Weekly, London Telegraph's Weekend magazine, Canada's Globe and Mail American Film Magazine and the New York Times.
Affiliated with the National Society of Film Critics, FIPRESCI (the International Film Critics Association) and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1981-95), she has taught Critical Writing at UCLA and has been a jury member at the film festivals of Berlin, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Hawaii, Manila, Seattle, Aspen, Sundance/Park City, Taos, Banff and Palm Springs. In 1987, she was given the Vesta Award for Journalism for her contribution to the arts in Southern California. She wrote the narration for Chuck Workman's "The First 100 Years: A Celebration of American Film" for Bravo, and in 2004 wrote the critical essay for the DVD of Horton Foote's Tomorrow for Home Vision Entertainment.
Having moved to Washington in 1996, she now reviews for the Seattle Weekly.
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Faithless
Have you ever betrayed someone you cared about? Caused damage, light or lacerating? Stepped high over the mess and walked away intact, or thought you had? Who, in this era, can say they haven't? Faithless is our reckoning day, a mesmerizing, unsparing look at the ruination of divorce, given shape, spirit and heart by Liv Ullmann's direction of Ingmar Bergman's screenplay.
Does that give the director more credit than she deserves? After all, this is Bergman. Yet what Ullmann worked from was, in essence, a very long monologue without so much as stage directions, and what she's made of it is so supple, so inventive, so much a work of the heart, that it's a revelation, perhaps even to her.
Faithless is director Ullmann's fourth film and first in a contemporary setting. Maybe that's freed her, because in spite of a narrative device that could have turned Faithless claustrophobic and stifling, Ullmann has taken the material by the scruff of its neck and shaken it to life. Never underestimate the power of directing something you may know a thing or two about, first hand.
As the film opens, an aging, reflective director (magnificent Bergman veteran and alter-ego Erland Josephson), whom the film notes call "Bergman," living alone in his windswept Faro island snuggery, summons to mind an actress to help him work out an intensely personal story he's writing, to give him a woman's perspective. Like a muse, Lena Endre appears, in a role that soon becomes two roles: the "actress" who will investigate this character with Bergman, and Marianne, his long-ago love who is an actress herself. (There is not an untruthful nor an unsparing second to Endre's magnificent performance.)
As we move into Marianne's life, her marriage is assured and comfortable. Markus (Thomas Hanzon) her dark-haired, appreciative husband is a conductor on the international symphony circuit; in the theatre, the vibrantly lovely Marianne has no shortage of roles, and their 9-year old daughter, Isabelle, is perfection, in the tradition of wide-eyed, prescient Bergman film children.
What could crack this marble-smooth surface? Jealousy. David (Krister Henriksson) is their closest friend, a film director in his late 40s who already has two bad marriages, two neglected young sons and a lousy reputation with women. Yet during one of her husband's trips abroad, Marianne slides into a dalliance with the difficult David, feeling that "I was simply a part of something mysterious. . that would always be there in my body."
For a while she is able to treat the affair lightly, even to tell Markus with innocent elaborateness that she and David will be in Paris at the same time, and let her husband encourage them to see each other there. However, as Marianne learns, it's dangerous to say to a man of David's competitiveness, "Markus says that sex with me is better than conducting The Rite of Spring." After their week in a grand, bordello-red Paris hotel room, David, volcanically jealous, becomes demanding and possessive and before our eyes, what has seemed secure is utterly in ruin.
Ullmann uses intuition and sheer audacity in sculpting her film. In a very unScandinavian move, she's had the guts to treat The Confrontation Scene more like sex farce than tragi-comedy, something that works brilliantly. And, in a change from Bergman's screenplay, she puts Isabelle onscreen, where we can see in one pure, clear-cut moment, the ruination of "this little self." It is excruciating.
In the last lines of her 1974 autobiographical memoir Changing, Ullmann asks Bergman if people would like the film they had just finished. His answer is as true for Faithless as it was for Face to Face.
"Regard it as a surgeon's scalpel," Bergman said. "Not everyone will welcome it."
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