Face to Face

Ingmar Bergman’s newest film, Face To Face, documents the nervous breakdown of a highly disciplined and capable psychologist named Jenny. It is about the failure of the modern technical specialist to come to grips with basic human problems -- love, death, guilt.

The death of her parents when Jenny was a child has left her feeling somehow to blame for not loving them enough, for being embarrassed by her father’s affection. Her guilt leaves her unable to show affection. Her guilt leaves her unable to love her husband and daughter. Jenny always does what is right. She smiles a lot, is clean and reliable. She has a deep fear of smelling bad. She also fears death and old age. She decides finally to elude her fear of death by trying to kill herself. (Death appears to her in dreaming and waking moments as a dark old woman with one normal and one totally black staring eye.)

Jenny begins to break down when she visits her grandparents’ home. She sleeps in her old room, remembering all the unresolved anger, fear, and doubt of her childhood. She also witnesses the decline and approaching death of her grandfather, who has suffered a stroke.

Jenny’s daughter is at summer camp, her husband in America at a convention. The little things that normally hold her life together are not there, and she panics. In a dream she tells her grandfather to count to ten when he is afraid to die, that we must keep something important between us and death at all times. Her own new house is empty and ominous, an uninhabited shell of past and future meaning.

Visiting her empty home on impulse one morning, she is attacked by some drug dealers who have brought a patient of hers there who has overdosed. She maintains total control and goes through her day as usual. But that evening in the home of Tomas, a doctor she met at a recent party, she begins to laugh hysterically. Watching her break down involves him with her in some intimate way. Two days later, as Jenny recovers from a suicide attempt, Tomas is in the hospital by her side constantly. His presence is reassuring. The problem for us unbelievers, he tells her, is knowing nobody else is really there. We hope that something will touch us and make us real.

Bergman has said about the movie that Jenny (played by ex-wife Liv Ullman) gives shape to his own anxiety. Tomas, by Jenny’s bedside, seems to be Bergman watching her battle with life and death, hoping for a clue to his own life.

For all the Nordic melancholy, there is a happy ending. Jenny, coming home from the hospital, watches her grandparents in a quiet, tender conversation and decides that love embraces all, even death. She walks briskly to the telephone and calls in to report back to work. But it seems too easy. Has she really discovered a life-changing truth or is she feigning normalcy?

Love, the Song of Solomon tells us, is as strong as death. And St. Paul tells us that love is the one eternal thing. It does encompass death. But does Bergman’s love? Does it in fact encompass anything? It seems to be a fleeting experience, soon forgotten. In the screenplay for Face To Face we’re told that as Jenny leaves her grandparents’ room, she forgets just as quickly her new perception. Love as St. Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 13 has a list of attributes, ways it is made real in the world, ways in which it makes ethical demands. In the film, it seems that we leave Jenny counting from one to ten from now to her death.

Sharon Gallagher was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.