Ingmar Bergman's "Face to Face" (1976)

As I'm finding to be the case with many of Bergman's films, Face to Face was quite difficult to sit through. Not because it's dull by any means, but because the subject matter is so heavy that it makes for a rather emotionally-challenging viewing experience. Although you have to be in the right state of mind to sit down with one of these darker pieces from Bergman's catalog, I found Face to Face to be particularly rewarding because of its important and ever-relevant presentation of mental illness in film. It shows just how fragile the human mind is in a not so subtle way, which is something rarely done, realistically at least, in the movies.

To summarize briefly, Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann) is a highly-praised psychiatrist going through life carrying great emotional baggage from her childhood. Her parents whom she was very close to died in an accident when she was a child, forcing her to live with her grandparents. Jenny's grandmother became a particularly menacing matriarch in her life, as she was constantly ridiculing and shaming her. This caused Jenny's self-esteem to become nonexistent to the extent of self-hatred and obsessive insecurities. She began to have a persistent fear of being unclean or emitting offensive odors. She felt inhuman. These fears were irrational of course, but began ruling her mind from a young age. This is all background story revealed much later in the film though.

Liv Ullmann

The film actually follows Jenny now in her adult life as she visits her grandparent's home, where she grew up. She stays in the same room, in the same bed. She appears very well put together and doesn't seem mentally unwell in any way, as the trouble of her youth has been tightly compressed and locked away. However, after a series of emotionally stirring events (such as a messy affair with a colleague and a bizarre break-in that results in attempted rape), Jenny's anxiety returns and quickly goes from bad to worse. Her emotional reactions stop lining up with the situations presented. This causes her to become increasingly worried about her mental state to the point of severe paranoia.

She eventually attempts suicide by sort of absent-mindedly downing an entire bottle of sleeping pills (watch Liv discuss the scene here). She doesn't succeed in killing herself, instead slipping into a coma. It's with this coma that we dip into some of the more surreal elements of the film; Jenny's bizarre dreams. We get an in-depth look at the horrors constantly torturing her thoughts. These dreams are definitely used more as visualizations of her tormented mind rather than thrills for the audience. There are no cheap scares here, as this is no horror film, though quite horrific. That said, these terrors are certainly presented in an artful manner. But in a very raw, natural way. This is not a romanticized image of a mental breakdown like say, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, where mental instability is quite glamorized.

That's what I really didn't realize going into Face to Face. It's an important portrait of mental illness in the same way a film like Sybil is. While it's entertaining, frightening and even quite beautiful to watch Jack Nicholson slip into madness in The Shining, that type of insanity is fictional. It gives us the finished product without showing us how things got to that point. What Bergman shows us here is a real case of the human mind being so wrecked with emotional damage that it finally breaks. We get such a close look at it that we see past Jenny's illness and really see her as a human, which allows the audience to identify with her no matter how mad she may be. The irony of this happening to an upstanding, well put together psychiatrist just seems to be saying this could happen to anyone... and it could.

Now this isn't to say that the more fictionalized stories don't have purpose, cause they can certainly be beautiful in their own right. But works such as Face to Face are important for more than just the reason of cinematic beauty. It's that sense of humanity that we find here. The human condition was one of Bergman's favorite subjects, and the humanity he brought to cinema is severely lacking today. 

Still, it can certainly be argued that he overused the "troubled childhood" theme in his films. After all, it's usually the source of his characters' problems it seems. But we never get a recycled feeling. The characters may come from similar roots, but we see a different part of life (perhaps Bergman's life) play out in each of his films.

Face to Face is miserable, agonizing and gut-wrenching, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. Sit down with this piece when you're ready to watch a seemingly normal person break down into pieces. If you're like me and constantly self-analyze, you'll probably end up recognizing fears and worries in Jenny that you yourself have perhaps experienced. This is what movies should do. Cinema doesn't always need be an escape from our lives, but sometimes an examination of the traits we all share as people. I'm nowhere near through with my Bergman viewing but I continue to be blown away. He's quickly becoming one of my very favorite directors, for sure. 

Check out this chilling clip below from the film. Notice the use of silence instead of music to build tension.