Usually for the older films I see I've been bunching them together so as to draw a distinction between "new" films and just films I see. This though I feel has to have a whole entry devoted to it, or more accurately devoted to her. I knew of Liv Ullmann's multi-award winning/nominated turn in this film for years. In fact that was one of the main reasons I wanted to see it. This film turned into a bit of an obsession for me - it's not available in this country, not on online rental or even in the dozens of films included in a recent Bergman box set - I tried to buy it on ebay once but problems with paypal made me lose it. Why such an interest? It's been described as the finest performance ever captured on camera.
Cutting to the chase, I agree with that sentiment and amazingly, it's not even close. I watched this last night (I found it online and it's the first thing I've ever downloaded - I don't like the idea of that but it's not as if I'm cheating anyone because it's unavailable here and I'd happily buy it if I could) and I lay in bed afterwards racking my brain trying to go through all of the performances I think are perfect and I couldn't think of a single one that's even in the same league, the closest would maybe be Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, but I'll explain later how this eclipses even that due to the role.
The plot set up is that Ullmann is a psychiatrist who slowly, but surely begins to unravel when her husband is in America for a conference and she moves back in with her Grandparents while covering a doctor who is away for two months. I'm very glad I didn't read reviews of this because they detail the *plot* beyond the pivotal halfway point because they want to talk about the situations Ullmann is placed in. I won't do that as I think it much more effective to let the story flow so I'll just mention moments.
Roles like this don't get written very often. The Madness of King George is probably the closest *role* I can think of that approaches it, but it basically requires Liv to run the gamate. Her first incredible scene is with a beautifully restrained Erland Josephson where having taken a couple of sleeping pills she begins to cackle, quickly it turns to sobs and then she's breaking down completely. It's an unsettlingly real moment that hardly any actress could do without looking like she's "acting". Later on she is screaming at Josephson flitting from herself as a child to her grandmother with every sentence, it's literally unbelievable how she pulls this off so completely convincingly.
The latter is where the distinction is drawn between her performance and Woodward's, for example, because she can "be" different "people" from sentence to sentence, but Woodward's were always self contained and separated, Bergman has written something much more demanding for Ullmann and she goes above and beyond what one could ever hope for. There's just nothing to touch it, she has created a character that not only goes through this (and is perfectly realised), through her performance she elicits emotions in the audience of real sympathy because you see this woman going through it and just want to comfort her. It's utterly remarkable, I've only had one experience like it in *real life* and she transported me back to the emotions I felt at that time.
I have to stop talking about Liv because I could be here literally all day waxing lyrical about the sheer brilliance of her performance. The film, I thought, was excellent. It's really interesting, Bergman has a few Rosemary's Baby ish dream moments and while it ends up not being very ambiguous at all, it works as it puts you in her self-referential state. I would also say the climax (not the very end) is a *little* fast, but I realise this was cut down from a much larger (200 minutes) piece intended for television.
Sometimes the hype of something is too much to bear. This performance though, rather like Lena Endre's in Faithless, is almost impossible to overhype. The role of a lifetime created for the greatest dramatic actress in cinema history - it's essential viewing.