'Infidel': The Swedish art of breaking up a relationship

"Our love affair was destructive and from the beginning carried all the misfortune imaginable in its baggage," explains Ingmar Bergman of his stormy relationship with Gun Hagberg, in his memoirs. The Magic LanternThe director met the journalist and future translator when they were both still married, he to his third wife, Ellen. The adulterous affair with Gun led to a new marriage, a son, and a subsequent divorce. It ended up inspiring two series. The first, Secrets of a marriage (1974), the Swedish television production we saw here in its film version. It's a piece that has left its mark like few other dramas about marital crises. The other creation based on that story is Unfaithful, the series that Filmin has just released, directed by Tomas Alfredson, which takes as its starting point another script by Bergman that had already led to a film of the same name by Liv Ullmann.

It has been more than twenty years since the director of Let me in (2008) and The mole (2011) wanted to bring this series to fruition. Alfredson even spoke with Ingmar Bergman about his intentions before the filmmaker's death in 2007. But circumstances didn't agree with him at the time. Now, having become one of Sweden's most renowned filmmakers, he returns with a whole series of changes compared to the original work. Alfredson and screenwriter Sara Johnsen have expanded the story of David and Marianne, a young film director who falls in love with his best friend's wife, over six episodes of approximately forty minutes each, allowing them to delve even deeper into the nuances of love, passion, and infatuation. They've also added Marianne's daughter, Isabelle, who becomes the sounding board for the traumas that arise during a divorce due to adultery. Because Unfaithful It does not aim to reproduce the story of passion between Ingmar and Gun, which in the fiction varies in strength with respect to what the filmmaker himself tells in his memoirs, but rather to capture the devastating effect that a story of this type has on its protagonists and their respective families. The series moves in two time periods: in the seventies, when the protagonists meet and fall fatally in love, and a present in which they meet again at a much older age.

The sensuality of Ingmar Bergman

Sensuality permeates the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, who, however, hardly included sex scenes in his films. Unfaithful, on the other hand, David's character ends up turning his new film, an adaptation of an erotic novel, into a vicarious way of crystallizing the sexual tension with Marianne. The series aims to capture the role of passion in such an intense bond, and it's interesting how cinema becomes the territory for conveying that attraction. The series also portrays a situation of abuse, this one explained by Bergman, with all the necessary discomfort.

Alfredson stages this homage to Bergman with his usual good taste. However, the series lacks the stormy current that shakes the Swede's filmography. Perhaps because the young performers, especially the male ones, are far from Bergman's style, perhaps because the director fails to maintain the dramatic tension typical of a film of this type, Unfaithful it doesn't hurt like they did Secrets of a marriage and Ullmann's adaptation. Bergman's shadow is particularly noticeable in the few scenes in the present, played by Lena Endre (also the protagonist of the Unfaithful cinematic) and a Jesper Christensen reminiscent of Erland Josephson.