Cinema: Over the Edge

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Face to Face is about a life-and-death struggle in which neither of the alternatives has commanding force. Erland Josephson, who played the husband in Scenes from a Marriage, makes an intelligent, forbearing Tomas, but the movie belongs to Liv Ullmann. She has never been better. Her Jenny is a definitive rendering of an emotional descent into hell. Many actresses have attempted this, but watching Ullmann do it, we realize how few have done it well. Hers is an intelligent, devastating performance. Ullmann's little smile of unsettled wellbeing, the desperation and desolation of her hysteria, are achieved by applying the most basic and most difficult concept in acting: abandonment and restraint. She reconciles the paradox flawlessly, as only great actors and actresses can.

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