The Talkies

...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1971...

...For it is apparent that madness "sells," and for a very good reason that has little to do with its alleged "politics": Insanity provides much material for compelling characterizations, and the extremities of insane behavior greatly expand dramatic possibilities...

...Two of the biggest critical and financial successes of 1975—The Story of Adele H. and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—dealt with insanity...

...Now there is nothing in principle against structuring a film in that manner, but the second half must somehow be as compelling as the first...

...What we see in Face to Face is a director's preoccupation carried to the level of obsession...

...For instance, the breakdown and suicide scenes, which are the emotional peaks of the movie, occur only halfway through the running time...

...Yet Ullmann's performance turns out to be merely empty virtuosity in the service of empty drama...

...We learn nothing about Jenny from those sequences, except that her past supplies no genuine clues to her present condition...

...There is every reason to believe that they are sincere in their concerns...

...Unfortunately, he has offered something even more trivial: Jenny's dreams and drug-induced remembrances of her childhood...

...By contrast, as if merely to demonstrate her range, Ullmann plays Jenny's subsequent suicide attempt in a blank, robot-like trance, mechanically stuffing handful after handful of sleeping pills into her mouth, with only slight, breathless gasps and the nervous click of the water glass against her teeth to convey the anguished depths of her despair...

...the latter film swept five Academy Awards...

...It is bad enough that these sequences are embarrassingly trite and laden with overwrought symbolism...

...But I suspect that such cultural considerations, though they may appear to be central in such films, are actually secondary to a rather more overtly cinematic concern...

...And now there is Ingmar Bergman's latest film, Face to Face, the story of Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann), a psychiatrist who suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide...

...The first half of the film provides a vivid picture of Jenny from the outside...

...it is all downhill from the middle...

...the mind that is being explored there is not Jenny's, but Bergman's...

...One of the first big hits of this year, Taxi Driver, featured a crazed cabbie cruising the streets of Manhattan...

...Writer/ director Bergman has simply failed to offer a truly compelling dramatic account of Jenny's plight, one that engages our understanding as well as our sympathy...

...The cultural message often serves only as proof that filmmakers are "serious," rather than merely exploitative...

...Art may begin with private concerns, but art that never rises beyond private obsessions is merely self-indulgent and arcane...

...As many have argued—most recently, Walter Goodman—cinema suffers by comparison to literature in its depiction of madness...

...The "politics of madness," which characterizes insanity as a "sane" response to a repressive society, seems to have won more than a few adherents among the filmmaking community...

...Although he claims that the dreams are "not my own," he also claims that he regards them as an "extension of reality...

...the second half attempts to find "reasons" for her breakdown within her mind...

...To be sure, the movies mentioned do evidence some of this influence: The asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest seems clearly intended as a metaphor for rational society...

...In the case of Face to Face, a direct comparison of the two artistic media is possible since the screenplay of the movie, somewhat different and more detailed than the film, has been published as a book...

...And Ullmann's emotional range and intensity are exceeded only by her control: Her discipline saves her from self-indulgent excess in the hysteria scene and from affectless method in the suicide scene...

...But even Ullmann gets lost in the second half of the movie...

...Both Francois Truffaut, the director of The Story of Adele H., and Ingmar Bergman have been preoccupied with female insanity for many years...

...yet it is a common complaint of feminist film critics that the only good female roles in recent years have been prostitutes and madwomen—a complaint, ideology aside, that is not without justification...

...The dream sequences are dramatically arbitrary, which renders even their psychological irrelevance somewhat beside the point...

...In the sequence involving Jenny's first breakdown, Ullmann's masterful shading of hysterical laughter into anxiety-choked sobbing is one of the most harrowing scenes of emotional intensity in recent memory...

...It would be tempting to interpret this epidemic of movie madness as symptomatic of a deeper, more widespread culFace to Face tural malaise...

...To the extent that Ullmann can, in the first half of the movie, make Bergman's concerns accessible to the film audience, Face to Face is powerful cinema...

...Viewers of Face to Face can only respond that his reality and its extension are not theirs...

...That is not true of Face to Face...

...By that I mean movies about madness, rather than madness about movies —although there has been more than enough of the latter, especially concerning the former...

...and the comparison evinces all of the cinema's limitations in portraying madness...

...And it is no coincidence that this structural inadequacy follows the break between the external and internal presentations of Jenny's madness...

...What I am suggesting, however, is that lunacy has provided the best roles for both sexes recently, precisely because lunatics' lives can be made "interesting"—cinematic madness can be the cause of, or the pretext for, all kinds of bizarre screen behavior...

...Fortunately, Berg-man has not relied upon facile "political" analysis or upon diluted themes of modernism to explain her plight...

...Adele H. seems clearly intended to be regarded as a victim of patriarchy and repressed female sexuality...

...Yet it is difficult to tell how much the intentions of movie makers or the responses of audiences and critics have been influenced by this cultural legitimation of insanity...

...No matter how vividly the external behavior patterns of insanity are conveyed—and there can be no disputing cinematic capability on that score—movies simply cannot satisfactorily reveal the internal workings of the deranged mind, except indirectly...

...Much of the movie madness epidemic reveals less about the state of our culture than about the state of certain directors' minds...

...It is simply that the last hour or so of the movie serves no dramatic purpose...

...I don't mean to impute excessively cynical motives to such movie makers, how32 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 ever...

...The role ofienny in Face to Face is one of the biggest plums for an actress in recent years, and Liv Ullmann's performance is a shattering tour de force...

...There can be little doubt that alienation, the key theme of modernism, has been carried to its logical extreme—insanity—and given increased cultural legitimation in recent years...

...Taxi Driver seems clearly intended to be a portrait of a psychotic in an even more psychotic environment, the hell of Manhattan...

...I can only speculate that they are not arbitrary for Bergman...

...This is of some interest because both have also been regarded as directors sympathetic to women...

...What is worse is that the dramatic content is virtually nonexistent...

...The problem is not so much that this internal account is clinically inadequate, for the movie does not pretend to offer that kind of analysis...

...But the shortcomings of Face to Face extend beyond the generic to the personal...

...This is not to suggest the "superiority" of literature to cinema, but only to point out the relevant differences and limitations...