Face to Face
Jenny, an accomplished psychiatrist, suffers a psychotic breakdown and a suicide attempt as hallucinations and buried childhood terror overwhelm her composure.
Academy Awards, Best Director and Best Actress nominations, 1977
Jenny Isaksson is a respected psychiatrist standing in for a colleague and staying at her grandparents' apartment while her own house is renovated. Composed and capable at work, she begins to be visited by frightening images and a laughing woman in black, and her outward control gives way to panic, a suicide attempt, and a descent into hallucination in which figures from her childhood return.
The film watches a professional whose defences have long kept feeling at bay lose them all at once, so that the terror she has treated in others surfaces in herself. For a therapist it is a close portrait of breakdown, of the thin line between clinician and patient, and of how early loss can be sealed over rather than mourned. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Actress in 1977.
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman (1918 to 2007) was a Swedish filmmaker who worked in cinema and the theatre across six decades. His films, among them The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander, return again and again to faith and its loss, to the strain inside marriages, and to childhood memory as it presses on adult life. He filmed dreams and the inner voice plainly, letting silence and the human face carry what characters could not say.
Details
- 1976
- Sweden
- Swedish
- Film