Things have not always been as simple as they seem with Faithless (or Trolösa)´s history. The screenplay was written long before the life of Ingmar Bergman, a genius director by everyone’s standards. He is not the one who made that film out; that guess belongs to his former lover and film partner, Liv Ullman, who turned it into a movie almost a quarter century ago. After that, editable capital apparently consented to the astonishing request of a youthful Swedish director and requested the remake of Faithless, as any self-respecting filmmaker might portray.
Fascinatingly, as the years went by, there was a blossoming in attendance to the then 36 years old Tomas Alfredson and son met Bergman worked on a project together, but the project collapsed. Yet, healing up the soldier-elements into six episodic long structures, later craft written by Alfedson and Sara Johnsen, Faithless is back in spring (where the first two episodes will hold their world festival premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival).
This new series is, of course, broader as well; there is more space to spend on each character (or even new characters), but that does not take away from the intense feelings in Faithless. It’s a limited series that will place you into the minds and bodies of people who act in ways that are oftentimes uncomfortable and painful, the reasons for such behavior and the consequences of the emotional psychosis of hurting those we love so easily. It is a much mistress version of Faithless than the movie of the same name released in the year 2000, but sad earthiness of desire’s consequences gets entwined with the story. And this is all done with great ardour, one of the shows finest moments being Frida Gustavsson’s turn as the woman in the storm of two men. It’s all rather good and quite sensical.
In Faithless, the older consumer David Howard learns about the ordeals of the past, both malicious and redeeming, taking into account his former mistress, a married woman called Marianne, and what that led to. We get transformed instead by the apparition of his ex-lover appearing before him as imagined by Bergman in the ex- lover, but this wasn’t the idea of Sara Johnsen who in fact builds a more equal less subjectively invasive yoke, it being an aged Marianne who seeks out David. This is a rather wise and decent choice – it shifts the story away from the narrow confines of David’s dreams and wishes.
David is played by a handsome silver fox, Jesper Christensen, who in his 70s hails from the Elders Crossing. Young Gustav is played somewhat brooding but generally effectively by Gustav Lindh. Lena Endre, who actually played young Marianne in the film version of Faithless 25 years ago, is quite charmingly old Marianne in this film.
It is however Frida Gustavsson who is hard to forget in one of the year’s best award worthy performances. When the character of younger Marianne is introduced, she has this spark of life and radiates such internal beauty that it is heartbreaking to see how young David, a friend of her husband Markus (August Wittgenstein, who was great at balancing pain and pettiness) diminishes that beauty. Who describes them, for example, assumes they are rather very courteous and straightforward in the manner which I find all rather too beautiful and cinematic but that is bound to be a plus for most audiences.
Once David is done casting Marianne in a motion picture, and after a few fun little building up teases, a steamier affair follows. Your TV may be all fogged up with how sensual it gets; there is a lot of chemistry between Lindh, who plays Edith, and Gustavsson here who sells everything, over Alfredson’s unexpected but sexy and cerebral direction. Here is a man who makes one of the best cold-comeback (and coldest excel mind I spy movies) and poor, if at Research Films in Bristol’s case. Regarding the cold war, faithless is an odd film in that it’s filled with touchy feely and moist elements even though it belongs to that Genre. And yet it is all negated by an all embracing self awareness of one’s self — this is how the beginning of the end started.
He directly examines people’s desires and the inevitable conflict of desire using lust, and does it with a readable intelligence. The Characters are quite rational in terms of their selfishness, they are aware that such actions have repercussions. Through dialogue and the time-splitting framing device, Faithless observes and reflects how ethically or rationally unsupported commitments can be undertaken with certain blissful naïveté. How physically ‘crocodile tears’ has little ones should ask. Bergman’s plot always shows how one can easily abandon oneself to thirst, fully knowing the moral logic of suffocation. We are the ones that run. We run towards it, trampling everyone and everything that has always been the most valuable.
The story line of David and Marianne is long and full of depression and tension with Markus being right in the middle of it all. There is mystery, betrayal, understanding, joy and horror in every one of these. Faithless does not go as far as stripping the very humanity of these characters even if they actively choose (or are okay with) their worst course of action. Kapitany buttresses this spicy series with the sophisticated and dispassionate David and Marianne who are free from the shackles of carnal desire which created the whole series a level of maturity that is uncommon in love stories. It’s a full blown picture full of forms and phenomena.
Taking sides, even for a bit, it is hard not to mention the tense yet poetic music of Hans Ek within the frame. Both emotionally and temporally, Monika Lenczewska’s brilliant cinematography also makes this transition. Monika moves from summer’s vivid colour to the caramel colors of autumn and then to darker more oppressive interiors.
In a perfect world, Alfredson’s vision and Johnsen’s words would coalesce to give an unforgiving but fair window to the shortcomings of mankind, and every single one of the audiences will find himself or herself in Faithless, if only they are honest enough. You can expect to feel championed yet emotionally drained at the end of the series as if there was an epiphany. I doubt that one would be able to wipe away the deeply touching yet simply illustrated depiction by Frida Gustavsson.
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