Please don't spend money on this.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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!

The first time I saw this, I thought the dream sequences were disappointing. The second time, I found them interesting. This time, I felt they were a mix of the two. Some work and some are too histrionic. And that describes the movie in general. I can't keep making excuses for it, it's just not very good. There are amazing moments (the rape scene, Jenny's talk with her daughter) but then are moments that are embarrassingly hacky. It's a rather vague and cheap depiction of madness, surprising because we know Bergman can do it well (see: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY). That final breakdown is cringeworthy. I don't blame Liv Ullmann. Bergman himself felt the movie was a failure, too ambitious. Despite some masterful elements (including a lot of Ullmann's performance) it's one of his weaker films overall. I will probably never get to see the complete version, which is too bad because I bet it comes together more cohesively, achieves a greater balance.

There are lots of truly great filmmakers in cinema history. Great films have been made everywhere in the world in the last 115 years. But true masters who fundamentally influenced and changed cinema are but a few, relatively speaking. Of course it first started with the 'fathers'. The people who participated in the birth of cinema, and help build cinema from the foundation up in early 1900, like D.W. Griffith in the United States, Giovanni Pastrone in Italy. And then in the 1920s filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein in Russia, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang in Germany, Alfred Hitchcock in England, Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor in the United States. Then in the 30s cinema had surpassed it's 'birth' stage, and was starting to evolve; grow. The format, the language and technique of a film were set and familiar. We knew what 'a movie' was, so now let's make them better and better. The final essential evolution was sound. From this point on the form was ripe. That's when the true masters of cinema slowly started to appear.Hitchcock is one of the most unique ones of the true masters, since he also was one of the fathers of cinema. He started in the mid 20s all the way up to 1976..! There are few to none other masters that can claim to have a number of classics in every decade from the 20s up to the 70s. But there are more, and even more interesting masters in cinema. People like Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard seem to be regarded as the greatest masters in general. Next to Kubrick, my favorite in this group is Ingmar Bergman.The cinema of Ingmar Bergman consists of films about people... struggling. Bergman is famous - and infamous - for his so called 'depressive movies'. But, for me it's so obvious and essential that they're not depressive at all. They depict the darkest and bleakest themes and subjects, but Bergman films are often very hopeful in the end. Lots of characters in his films are depressed; or struggling with anxiety and fear, sure. But depression is never his main goal. Bergman depicts, disassembles, analyzes and explores the human psyche. The soul. Meaning. And always in/near the context of the greatest existential concepts and ideas. The meaning of life might be rooted in emptiness in his work, but it's what we as humans do with life and ourselves that creates the existence of beauty, love and spiritual connection (which is my personal vision as well). Bergman is masterful in creating the most beautiful moods ever made in cinema. His films sometimes feel like the wind; sometimes like a mirror burning with fire; sometimes like an angry clown. But he touches you, from deep within."Ansikte mot ansikte" (aka "Face to face") is a film about Jenny (played by Liv Ullman). Jenny is a psychiatrist who is confronted with one of her deeply disturbed but tragically endearing patients called Maria. A woman lost in an erotic spell of insanity and troubled thoughts. A mystery. As the film progresses Jenny slowly but surely seems to go in the same direction as the enigmatic Maria. We learn about her inner-demons and outher-troubles as she falls into the abyss of the human psyche. When she 'breaks' in the centre of the film, the film goes inwards - we experience her world of troubling thoughts and experiences in a beautifully confusing dreamlike innervision (think "Lost Highway" without the modern/pop element). In the end it all turns out to be...This was the one Bergman film I had yet to see for a long time. Brilliant and beautiful!

Face to face is another example of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's masterful direction in order to penetrate into his actors' psyche. Bergman's sole intention in his movies is to convey the emotions, the interaction between different personalities and how they swift in the film. He uses long uninterrupted takes in such effect that many times throughout the film someone could get carried away and find itself present in the room with the protagonists. It's like Sven Nykvist forgets the camera somewhere recording, but the action continues... Bergman's usual partners are present obviously in Face to Face. Aformentioned cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who by the way has won two Oscars for Bergman's "Fanny & Alexander" and "Cries and Whispers" and was nominated for "face to face", does again superb job. But in my opinion the film is worth viewing mostly for Liv Ullmann's extraordinary performance, mominated for an Oscar as well. There is nothing that I could add, Bergman fans will find the master here in peak form. I hope all film fans will one day discover Ingmar Bergman's cinema, it would be an unpreceded experience. Better late than never...