Episode #58 -- Faithless

Or: “Was Last Week’s Episode About A Family Being Utterly Destroyed By An Affair Not Grim Enough For You? Buckle The Fuck Up Then, Because Here Comes Round Two!”

Boy, that’s a bad trailer. If you get the DVD version of Faithless, you’ll find, as we did, that the designers of the DVD decided to play the trailer first when you tried to choose the option to watch the movie, which seems like a questionable design choice. It seems pretty likely that you’ve committed yourself to watching a movie if you’ve purchased or rented the DVD, but maybe they were just wanting to give people one last out, or something? Not the best call, because it resulted in a very confusing minute and a half where we were like, “This can’t be how the movie starts, can it? Is… is Ingmar Bergman bad?” The answer, thankfully, is no— his script paired with Liv Ullmann’s directing makes for a much more compelling movie than this trailer would let on, and it’s in Swedish and properly subtitled, so the awkward heavy-handed dubbing seen here is mercifully absent. The movie is about the havoc adultery can wreak on a family, so there are a few plot threads here that are vaguely similar to last week’s episode, as the alternate title of this episode and the fact that it’s a movie written by Ingmar Bergman would suggest, things are quite a bit more emotionally brutal here than they were in Le Bonheur.

Here’s a brief introduction to the movie that Ullmann did at a screening of Faithless that happened at the Toronto International Film Festival a few years back— it’s well worth checking out, if you have fifteen minutes to spare:

This is the last of our current six-episode run, but we will be back in a couple of months with a new batch of episodes that are pipin’ hot and fresh from our word ovens and look, we’re going to keep using that as a euphemism for our mouths, so you all had better just get real comfortable with it. You’ll be hearing from us again relatively soon, though— we have a horror-themed special episode in the works that may bring the wrath of Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals down upon our heads which will theoretically come out on Halloween rather than Christmas. Theoretically. It’s like a cliffhanger, sort of— will we get our shit together enough to watch (as of the time of this writing) nine more movies in an as-yet-to-be-identified franchise and edit our incoherent ramblings into a moderately more coherent discussion of the series in time for the best holiday? WE WILL SEE.