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What makes it different from others?

It is a performances centric movie

A lot of fun.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Ingmar Bergman treats Liv Ullmann to a star turn worthy of Joan Crawford in her heyday which culminates in an emotional outburst that Ullmann doubtless had a blast filming, and earned her an Oscar nomination.You know Ullmann's drama-queen suicide attempt will be unsuccessful, otherwise the TV series this originally was would have abruptly ended at the start of episode three when she downs the pills; and would have had to relocate to the next world. In a way it does, since when she wakes up in hospital, delirium sets in, in a manner recalling Doris Svedlund's dream sequence in 'Fängelse' (1949), with Ullmann drifting about dressed in red as in 'Cries and Whispers'.In his thirty years since his debut as a director, Bergman had long ago lost his interest in depicting the lives of blue-collar workers, and ' Face to Face' occupies the rarified world of affluent professional people, so we see hardly any staff in the hospital in which Ullmann's been billeted; and nobody comes to investigate her shouting.

Shot in 1975, originally for Swedish television, Ingmar Bergman's film ANSIKTE MOT ANSIKTE (Face to Face) explores the idea of a psychiatrist herself struggling with mental illness.As the film opens, Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann) is standing in an empty house, her family having removed everything in preparation for a move into a new house later that year. In the meantime, her husband is working in America for a few months and her daughter is at a summer camp. Waiting for the family to be reunited and move into the new house, Jenny temporarily settles in with her grandmother (Aino Taube) and grandfather (Gunnar Björnstrand), the latter of whom is poignantly suffering from dementia. Jenny is initially happy to dedicate herself to a new position at the clinic, but soon she finds the wall between reality and delusion breaking down, and the film chronicles her deterioration.I personally don't consider ANSIKTE MOT ANSIKTE "major Bergman". Firstly, the cut theatrical version feels sputtering and unfocused and consequently its 2-hour length can seem interminable. Sadly, the original television version has never been released, so neither can audiences have that. Secondly, Bergman had made a few films before that dealt with madness or the dark regions of the psyche, and especially in the second half of ANSIKTE MOT ANSIKTE the director resorts to what had already become some clichés for him.Still, even second-rate Bergman is worth at least one viewing. In spite of often retreading past ground in showing us what's in Jenny's head, Bergman does at times give us a fresh angle on the theme of mental illness, attempting to convey how much loneliness and shame it involves. Jenny is wracked with emotion but unable to communicate it to those around her, and she feels utterly alone as even those close to her fail to understand her plight. The acting is also superb, with Liv Ullman able to portray a whole spectrum of mental states. Erland Josephson appears in a supporting role, one of the threatening, Mephistophelian characters he did so well.There is, incidentally, one aspect of this film that makes it a real curiosity in Bergman's body of work. Over the preceding couple of decades, Bergman had shot films that were either period films (medieval or early 20th century) or were fairly contained dramas about small, mainly upper-class circles, with little representation of broader society and changing mores. Here, however, the outside world suddenly and rather crudely intrudes on a Bergman film: early on, Jenny attends a party thrown by a campy, somewhat Cathy Berberian-like, elderly woman (Sif Ruud) who dotes on a pair of gay men that she has quasi-adopted. The two men are homosexual stereotypes, sashaying, tight jeans and all, and the party involves some sexually libertine folk dancing to Abba-like pop music of the time. One gets the impression that Bergman was feeling challenged by younger filmmakers like Vilgot Sjöman, but this sudden reflection of 1970s Sweden quickly disappears and the film returns to more traditional Bergman territory.

One of my film-watching habits is to amble around widely-ranging varieties of films from different directors, different eras, different genres and different countries, then randomly picks one under my own volition, from time to time, I may have a compulsive appetite towards Ingmar Bergman, though whose films often demands a longer interval between, almost 5 months after watching SUMMER INTERLUDE (1951, 7/10), my second entry of this year's Bergman pilgrimage is FACE TO FACE, his latter psychiatric study of a tormented woman's endeavor to find her true self, and the most extraordinary feat is unbiasedly attributed to Liv Ullmann's tour-de-force commitment to her role, a quintessential once-in-a-lifetime liberation to be elicited on the screen, a touchstone for Liv's legendary career! A 35mm color film, Liv Ullmann plays a psychiatrist, who has just emptied her house and relocated to live with her grandparents while waiting to be transferred abroad with her frequent- on-business husband and her daughter, currently is in a student camp. Then the claustrophobic apartment where her grandparents stay apparently is also the place she spent most of her childhood, and it uncannily resurrects the wraith of a forbidding image haunts her once and now reappears, an indeed hair-raiser out of Bergman's indomitable close-framing.Liv's mental condition keeps going downhill after she experiences an unsuccessful rape attempt, which subsequently evokes her inner sexual dissatisfaction and she confides to her new acquaintance she at first met at a friend's birthday party (a fellow doctor whose initiative towards her is a moot and will turn out to be closeted gay man, played by Josephson, who retreats from Liv's counterpart husband in SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE 1973, 8/10 to a sidelined observer) about her innermost desire. Deeply harassed by the recurring wraith she executes a futile suicide, whereupon she alternatively battles between dream and reality, the illusory dream sequences cast a self-emancipating spell on her but remains elusive to its audiences (her strait- laced childhood, the guilt towards her parents' car accident etc.), finally she seems to convalesce from the incubus and decides to return to work and embrace a brand new day as if nothing has happened, the film abruptly ends, withholding its own POV of what will ensue next. Death and love is an eternal theme for Bergman, and they surround each other, through his stoic camera-work and overlong gazes into Liv's escalating breakdown, under the veneer of a normal life, each human individual has a variety of discrepant mentalities contribute to our own distinctiveness and intricacy, within the art form of cinema, no one can best Bergman in this slant and FACE TO FACE is his fastidious anatomy of a living soul to the utmost bareness, as disquieting and repercussive as ever!

As every one of Ingmar Bergman's films, "Face to Face" (1976) deals with Life, Love and Death. The Bergman's alter ego in the film is "a well-adjusted, capable and disciplined person, a highly qualified professional woman with a career, comfortably married to a gifted colleague and surrounded by what is called "the good things of life." It is this admirable character's shockingly quick breakdown and agonizing rebirth that I have tried to describe. I have also, on the basis of the material at my disposal, shown the causes of the disaster as well as the possibilities available to this woman in the future." (Ingmar Bergman) This seemingly successful woman who would attempt a suicide is played by Liv Ullmann and whatever has been said about her in this film as a psychiatrist who faces and struggles with her own nervous breakdown, still can not describe how she did it. For almost two hours, she is in every scene of the film, "lonely, ashamed", and facing unbearable nightmares of her past, struggling for her sanity. She gave, perhaps, the most powerful and unforgettable performance by any actress on the screen. She literally transforms herself in several different persons - her voice, facial expressions, the manner of speech, emotions - change with such a rapid speed and so effortlessly in front of you - it would take your breath away.I've never been as moved and fascinated by any performance on the screen as by Liv's in the film and I think the second time even more than the first one. Sure, it was a Bergman's film, his ideas, his anxieties; his "toothache" in the heart but it was Liv who lived through them and showed them with such powerful depth, honesty and selflessness that the film will always belong to her. This is one performance never to forget.Both Bergman and Ullmann were nominated for an Oscar (directing and acting) but for unknown and strange reasons, the movie is not available on DVD or even on tape."yes" – to the movie and YES! to Liv Ullmann