In the first scene of Face to Face, Ingmar Bergman's beautiful, agonizing new film, Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann), a psychiatrist with a firm grip on what she takes to be the real world, walks through the newly empty rooms of a house she is moving out of. As she looks about, we share her  particular sense of unexpected space. The texture of the wooden floors is seen as if for the first time. The white walls are bright but neutral?simply impersonal backdrops after all. In the void there are echoes of Jenny's footsteps.

Lives?even the most carefully managed?are voids filled with echoes. The echoes accumulate. Sometimes when one least expects it the mind's tuning device, a kind of psychic censor, breaks down and the echoes cannot be sanely controlled. Forgotten moments from the past push into the present. Signals cross, messages overlap. The garble in the void is insupportable. There may be nothing else to do but to turn off.

Face to Face, which opened last night at the Beekman Theater, traces Jenny's sudden, breathtaking descent into despair, her unsuccessful suicide attempt, and her apparent recovery. That is the shape of the film anyway. Face to Face, like all Bergman films, reaches out to contemplate all sorts of other things, from the more or less fixed, contemporary reality of Jenny's career, her marriage, family, and friends, to the emotional anxieties, represented by the echoes from her past, that come out of the dark to overwhelm her.

As Jenny sits on her bed in a room filled with sunlight, and sets about the task of swallowing handfuls of sleeping pills, she tells us she feels neither fear nor sadness. She is instead cheerful, excited as if going on her first train trip.

Why does Jenny do it?

The only reservation I have about Face to Face is that Mr. Bergman, perhaps for the first time, is uncharacteristically explicit when it comes to laying out the reasons for Jenny's breakdown. In a series of dreams and waking hallucinations that form important sections of the film he takes us on a guided tour of a house of Jenny's subconscious,  a journey through a house of horrors as immaculately tended as a Disneyland funhouse, and carefully laid out to save the biggest surprises for the last few minutes of the ride.

This Freudian literalness is surprising in that Mr. Bergman seems clearly to believe that psychiatry is, at best, a passing fad, something of a shell game, though his feelings are ambivalent. There are times when one suspects that his vision of the decline and fall of Jenny the Psychiatrist, with whom Ingmar Bergman the artist intensely identifies, is really the analysand's ultimate revenge on the analyst. Two things are going on at the same time. The patient is saying, "He's crazier than I," but "I am him."

In his preface to the published screenplay (somewhat expanded from what we see on the screen), Mr. Bergman admits that he's always been "extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions, and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.'"

He goes on to say that he thinks of the dreams in this film as being "extensions of reality," and thus, I suppose, not to be taken literally as dreams (if that's not too much of a confusion).

Whatever they are, when fitted together they give us a detailed psychiatric profile of Jenny's childhood when, orphaned as a result of an automobile accident, she was raised by her maternal grandparents, who were loving, strict, and, on occasion, stupendously unfeeling.

The power of Face to Face is not in its case history. It's in the brilliant drama of an intelligent woman attempting to come to terms with all sorts of disappointments, which will never be made right, and contradictions that have to be reconciled. These are most movingly demonstrated in Jenny's relationship with her grandparents, especially her grandmother, who was an ogre in Jenny's childhood but whom we see, in old age, as a woman of profound gentleness and wisdom, being infinitely kind and patient to a husband who is fighting an angry losing battle with senility.

Almost ignored by the film is Jenny's husband, who is in America during most of the film and who, when we do see him, seems too priggish and dull ever to have interested a woman of Jenny's capabilities?though this may be because we are seeing him through the eyes of the woman who no longer loves him.

Face to Face is another tour de force for Miss Ullmann, who is nothing short of immense. I know of no other actress today who has at hand the reserves that enable her to move so effortlessly through such multiple levels of mood and feeling. But then nobody today except Mr. Bergman writes such roles for actresses. Erland Josephson, Miss Ullmann's costar in Scenes from a Marriage, is also fine in the much smaller but very affecting role of a man who might have loved Jenny but for one small impediment?his homosexuality.

With Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage, Mr. Bergman's newest film forms a trilogy quite distinct from his earlier though equally fascinating films. In these last three works, Mr. Bergman is more mysterious, more haunting, more contradictory than ever, though the style of the film has never been more precise, clear, levelheaded.
Vincent Canby, NY Times, April 6, 1976