A Spoon Full of Masochism

After recently watching Faithless, a film Ingmar Bergman wrote and Liv Ullmann directed...

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...I've been thinking about the telling of painful stories well.  In Faithless, an aging screenwriter conjures a woman to help him tell a layered tale of deception and betrayal between her, her husband, and the husband's best friend.  Ullmann and Bergman made striking choices about which parts of the story the woman narrates while moving from window seat to armchair to guest chair in the screenwriter's seaside study and which parts get staged in Paris and Stockholm and the Swedish countryside.  The appearance of a key prop tells us which of the two men the screenwriter is, and also lets us know that this affair really happened.**


Now, I happen to like movies with Russian-doll plot lines like this.  Carlos Saura's films Carmen and Tango stand out for their intricacy.  My question is why writer-directors like Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen choose to be mean to their characters.  Is it auteurial self-loathing?  Sure, they're gifted filmmakers, but their later films in particular show a disappointment in humanity—a misanthropy—that just begs scoffing and dismissiveness.  The pity is they slime the audience with that misanthropy as thoroughly as their characters. Self-loathing doesn't have to lead to cruelty.  Suicide suggests self-loathing, but David Foster Wallace's contrasting kindness towards his fictional characters and the world leaps to mind.  Wallace could write about vile characters doing despicable things, but never with a whiff of cruelty towards them.


Maybe Faithless could have focused more on the effect of the adults' actions on the woman's daughter, like Fanny and Alexander centered on the children, but the screenwriter in Faithless insists the woman articulate her sin and his.  At least she's allowed to protest the anguish of the recounting and grieve the damage to the girl (thank you, Ullmann?).  By the end, the characters are wrung out, and so is the audience.  What does it take to explore difficult truths in film without requiring the collusion of the viewer's masochism?

Susana Darwin

*http://www.discshop.se/filmer/dvd/trolosa/P29100
**"really" as in within the film and "really" as in in Bergman's real life