Format: Internet video on laptop.
Geek out enough on movies, and eventually you’ll wind up watching Ingmar Bergman. Whether or not you’re watching his actual movies or just the legion of films and directors who were inspired by him, you can’t escape the massive shadow he has cast on the film world. There’s a reason, though, that Face to Face (or Ansikte mot Ansikte as it is called in Swedish) isn’t listed in the same breath as films like The Seventh Seal or Persona (or about a dozen others). This isn’t a bad film, but it’s one that more or less hinges entirely on the performance of Liv Ullmann. It’s similar in a lot of ways to Persona, but not nearly the same film. It’s telling, in fact, that while it was nominated for both Best Director and Best Actress for Bergman and Ullmann respectively, it wasn’t even nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
Essentially, this is the story of a woman’s mental and emotional breakdown. The interesting level of meta that is superimposed on this is that the woman in question, Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Ullmann), is a psychiatrist. It is, more or less, the same ground that Bergman trod with Through a Glass Darkly and Persona both with this added wrinkle of the sufferer being more acutely and professionally aware of her own neuroses. It’s also longer than both of those films, which makes it a much harder sit.
