Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann followed a 30-year career on stage and screen with Sofie (1992), her directorial debut. Three films later, she is ready to contend for the Palme d'Or in Cannes, with yet another collaboration with her former common-law husband, Ingmar Bergman, who wrote the script for Trolösa (Faithless).

"Actually I told him, 'This is a very personal film, and I think you should do it yourself'," Ullmann recalls. "But he said he just couldn't go through it. So I offered, 'Why don't you do the pre-production and the post-production, and I'll be happy to do the studio work for you. But he didn't want to. So I said, 'Then the movie is mine and I will obviously have to make my own interpretation.' He agreed, adding that it would make the film even more interesting."

Describing Faithless as "a morality [tale] which does not moralise" ­ or "a modern day emotional thriller" ­ Bergman based the story, about a woman torn between two men and a nine-year-old daughter, on an episode from his own life. "In the film," he says, "she tells an author ­ which happens to be me ­ about this very dramatic part of her life. It happened a long time ago, and I knew the persons involved very well. But I could not write about it till now, when they are all gone. Still, had Lena Endre not accepted the part, nothing would have come of it.

"Also I can reassure those who usually worry about my productions being about my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, my aunts, my uncles or my cousins, that none of them will appear in this film. There is only one exception ­ the author, who is myself. But according to Liv, I am such a bad actor that Erland Josephson has to impersonate me. He has a certain routine in doing that, having already impersonated me in the television play Efter Repetitionen (After The Rehearsal)."

Photographed by Jörgen Persson, and starring Endre ­ a Bergman regular both at Stockholm's Royal Dramaten Theatre and on the screen ­ Faithless follows an actress visiting an elderly author (Josephson as Bergman) while he is writing a script. She also plays the woman he once loved, Krister Henriksson is her lover, and Thomas Hanzon her world-famous husband. "We witness the old Bergman in his study, once a leading figure in the 'love-making' dance, now feeling pangs of conscience for what he then did to her," Ullmann explains.

"The unfaithfulness in the film is not a conscious unfaithfulness, not an act of evil. Nowadays, living in a state of unfaithfulness is just a way of life more and more people prefer. The moral dictates disappear. Here, two men and a woman decide to 'play' an 'adult game': let us love a little dangerously, let us be happy together, let us forget what is good and what is evil. Then, suddenly, everything collapses. All are unfaithful to another. But the light of the story is that we can forget the hours that were full of suffering. What we must never forget is what they taught us," Ullmann concludes.

Her third feature, Enskilda Samtal (Confessions) ­ also from a script by Bergman ­ was in Un Certain Regard two years ago. "Normally, I do not believe that works of art should compete with each other," she says. "Still, I am tremendously happy that Faithless is here, and I really share the excitement with all who gave their hearts to it."

Jørn Rossing Jensen