Ingmar Bergman’s newest film, Face To Face, documents the nervous breakdown of a highly disciplined and capable psychologist named Jenny. It is about the failure of the modern technical specialist to come to grips with basic human problems -- love, death, guilt.
The death of her parents when Jenny was a child has left her feeling somehow to blame for not loving them enough, for being embarrassed by her father’s affection. Her guilt leaves her unable to show affection. Her guilt leaves her unable to love her husband and daughter. Jenny always does what is right. She smiles a lot, is clean and reliable. She has a deep fear of smelling bad. She also fears death and old age. She decides finally to elude her fear of death by trying to kill herself. (Death appears to her in dreaming and waking moments as a dark old woman with one normal and one totally black staring eye.)
Jenny begins to break down when she visits her grandparents’ home. She sleeps in her old room, remembering all the unresolved anger, fear, and doubt of her childhood. She also witnesses the decline and approaching death of her grandfather, who has suffered a stroke.
Jenny’s daughter is at summer camp, her husband in America at a convention. The little things that normally hold her life together are not there, and she panics. In a dream she tells her grandfather to count to ten when he is afraid to die, that we must keep something important between us and death at all times. Her own new house is empty and ominous, an uninhabited shell of past and future meaning.
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