Grade: B+

Verdict: A wise, often painful meditation on art, passion and forgiveness.

Details: Starring Lena Endre and Erland Josephson. Directed by Liv Ullmann. Rated R for sexual content, some nudity and profanity. In Swedish with subtitles. Two hours, 22 min.

See it: Local theaters and showtimes for Faithless

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Review: The old man's name is Bergman, and he's played by Erland Josephson. He's the Swedish actor who served as director Ingmar's double in several film meditations on identity, sex, betrayal, and, oh yeah, the general fate of mankind in an indifferent universe.

Josephson may be best remembered from “Scenes From a Marriage.” He played a man whose infidelities shock screen wife Liv Ullmann, and shatters their union. “Faithless” covers some of the same ground, but almost from the opposite viewpoint: The transgressor this time is the actress Marianne (Lena Endre), whose attraction to her colleague, the director David (Krister Henriksson), threatens to smash her life with composer husband Markus (Thomas Hanzon) and their 9-year-old daughter Isabelle (the solemn, dark-eyed Michelle Gylemo).

Actually, the action isn't quite that straightforward. Meditating alone in his study at his isolated island home, Josephson's Bergman conjures Marianne into being. She appears from the shadows of his mind, a fiction-in-the-flesh who, along with the old man, revives memories of this long-ago, obsessive affair.

If you've read Bergman's autobiography, “The Magic Lantern,” you'll know the story is similar to the director's real-life affair with journalist Gun Grut, who eventually became his third wife (out of of five). You could easily get lost, or at least distracted, by the autobiographical hall-of-mirrors Bergman has erected in his script. Adding another layer to it, Ullmann, his onetime lover and frequent star, directs the film (the second script Bergman has entrusted to her).

Even without its teasing, art-vs.-reality embellishments, the movie is at times a riveting, emotionally painful dissection of love, “that jungle of impulses and attacks of vertigo,” as one character describes it.

As the movie lengthens, we start to realize this isn't just an aging writer-director's latest script. It's his way to approach a painful episode in his life, entering via the side door of fiction. And by the end, it's clear that the story is less about Marianne than about David, the younger Bergman stand-in whose bursts of jealousy slowly and irreversibly poison their relationship. This is both Bergman's self-condemnation and mea culpa for past mistakes, and though the movie can be punishingly slow at times, it gathers considerable emotional power.

When he was still directing (1982's “Fanny & Alexander” was his last feature), one of Bergman's great gifts was channeling his themes through a series of remarkable female muses, in particular Ullmann. Now in the director's chair herself, Ullmann coaxes a searing performance by Endre that does her mentor proud.

Henriksson is also strong as the Bergman doppelgänger, though the script, perhaps for understandably personal reasons, is unforgiving toward the character. Bergman is almost too hard on himself, erasing from his fictional version the charm and intelligence that must have attracted so many women into his tumultuous love life.

For anyone unfamiliar with Bergman's films, “Faithless” — with its slow takes, hushed exchanges and enigmatic atmosphere — may seem like the work of an alien. But what's really alien, and refreshing, about it is exactly what sets it far apart from the wider world of teen comedies and action flicks. It's a movie that shows us that the silence between two people can be more dramatic than 100 pages of dialogue.

— Steve Murray, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution