It seems we have been wrong about Liv Ullmann for about three decades - or maybe she has just been miscast. While we immediately think of her as the iconic, luminously expressive face of Ingmar Bergman's searching films, underneath all that Nordic soulfulness is a comic actress struggling to emerge.
On a visit to Dublin at the end of last year, as a guest of the first annual festival of Women In Film And Television, the Norwegian actress-turned-director was loud, funny and uninhibited, with a hearty, thigh-slapping laugh, ready warmth and undimmed beauty that charmed her audience.
Seizing a microphone and bellowing above the buzz of the opening night's reception, she admonished everyone to stop drinking and make their way into the cinema, pronto, to watch her new, "quiet" film. She was afraid that the Friday night crowd might not appreciate the modulated rhythms of Private Confessions, which she directed from a screenplay written by Ingmar Bergman, her mentor, close associate of many years and father of her daughter. Expanding on some of the autobiographical material in The Best Intentions, which was written by Bergman and directed by Bille August, Private Confessions continues Bergman's examination of his parents' lives and is set in Sweden in the 1920s. Pernilla August plays Anna, a woman at a crossroads in her marriage and her life, who confides in turn in her confirmation priest; her husband, a highly-strung Lutheran pastor from whom she has become estranged; her young lover, a theology student; and her oldest woman friend. Concentrating on strong, intense performances from a cast of experienced stage actors, the film is an intimate chamber piece, formally divided into five sections, shaped by Anna's conversations (or confessions) but not presented in chronological order.
As we watch Anna in conversation with her various auditors, we realise that she is tailoring her version of events in each case, and that we'll never be sure when she is telling the truth. As the layers of the past are successively peeled away, and the interior lives of the characters are probed, ambiguity remains. "The film questions whether we even know when we are telling the truth," Ullmann says. "Sometimes you feel compelled to lie, as Anna does, to allow someone to die in peace. Or you try to tell the truth, but you are not being true." As when, for example, the truth is used as a weapon? "Exactly. Anna is brutally honest with her husband about her affair, but she tells him when she is angry with him, to hurt him. But I'm never really sure when Anna is telling the truth; neither was Pernilla August (who played the part), and Ingmar certainly wasn't."
Ingmar's name ("he's a genius") crops up a lot in conversation with Ullmann, and in many ways Private Confessions could have been directed by him, as well as scripted. Having performed in nine of his films, it's hardly surprising that Ullmann has been influenced by him, and she is interested in similar psychological, philosophical and spiritual themes. The changing status of women and its effect on relationships between the sexes has been an important theme of Bergman's films, and the scenario of Private Confessions explores the reverse side of Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage (starring Ullmann in 1973), in which a wife tries to come to terms with the revelation that her husband is having an affair. As well as echoing that earlier film, the role of Anna in Private Confessions is consonant with another role which Ullmann has memorably made her own, in Oslo, London and Broadway: that of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. It's a role that is emblematic of women's long journey in the 20th century from the private, domestic realm to the public world, from definition by others to the quest for self-definition. It's a theme that is close to Ullmann's heart.
"Of course I bring the awareness of all that to my direction of this film, just as when I was acting, I built up my characters, layer upon layer, from the roles that I had played before. But I need to be careful as a director to listen to the actors; to draw them out, yes, but to allow them to create their own performances, to listen to their own inner voices."
In the first volume of her autobiography, Changing (1976), Ullmann wrote that the highest praise she received for her stage portrayal of Nora was that she had (in the Buddhist phrase) "allowed the cloth to weave the cloth", or in her own words, "let Nora play Nora". This is the kind of direct expressiveness that she aspires to as an actor and a filmmaker. She has adopted Bergman's trademark use of close-up, the lovingly intrusive examination of faces, repeatedly scanned with an almost obsessed scrutiny. "I love close-ups," she says. "They are a challenge. As an actor I loved the sense of being utterly naked and exposed: we hope that people will see and recognise the life behind the face. This is the way we want to show ourselves to someone we love. It is the recognition we all long for in our souls." Deliberately going against the tendency of much contemporary cinema towards ironic detachment which keeps the viewer at a distance and plays with the technical, formal and visual possibilities of the medium, Ullmann's goal in her films is to come as close to the viewer as possible. This aspiration to achieve the most transparent communication possible, in which all the artifice of cinema is employed to create the illusion of artlessness, is of course an impossible one, just as in Private Confessions the "absolute truth" is unattainable. "Yes. This is true. But in that attempt, in that quest, is the best that the human spirit is capable of," Ullmann says.
That response and all of the words Ullmann uses about her work reflect her deep-rooted religious impulses, her belief that our lives have a larger purpose. The unflinching spirit of the Danish philosopher, Kirkegaard, informs her work, as well as that of Ibsen. Her concerns are with how we live, with why we love and hate, with doubt, guilt, sin, tolerance and forgiveness - with the examined life. "These are the things that are important. This is what we are constantly learning about, all our lives. We are learning how to be human." Last year she received a Wittenberg award from the Lutheran Institute for her contribution to church and society. For years Ullmann was a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF and is currently vice-president of the UN's International Rescue Committee for refugees. She has also set up her own organisation, the Women's Commission For Refugees, and is bringing out a fund-raising book this year, Letter To My Grandchild, with contributions from some of the world's celebrities, to whom she has ready access.
"I write all the time and I travel around the world lecturing. It's easy for me to combine this work with my films. When I was young I used to resent my fame. I hated the intrusion and the expectations of me. Now I see that I can use my high profile to publicise these human rights issues and to talk about the things that matter. "But you know, we can't all become saints. Some people will leave what they have and become doctors and nurses in the Third World, and the first time I visited refugee camps in Campuchea, Thailand and Hong Kong, I thought I would never be the same again. I would change my life. But on the flight home to New York, I found myself complaining about the awful coffee. I was right back in my world of privilege.
"We can slowly change our priorities - we can learn. But in the end, you have to follow your own soul. And this coffee's pretty good, thank God." She laughs delightedly and squeezes my arm.
For information on Women In Film And Television, tel: Anne Burke, (01) 706 7035.
