Swedish Drama Faithless: Infidelity and Intrigue!

Faithless (Sky Atlantic) 

Rating: Four out of five stars 

The trouble with the English, says arty film-maker David in the Swedish infidelity drama Faithless, is they, 'can't tell the difference between eroticism and pornography'.

This is a bit strong, coming from a man whose first movie is a romance set in a bordello, where a soldier falls in love with one of the prostitutes. 'We fear neither sex nor violence!' declares David's producer, thrilled by the script.

But that's the Swedes for you. They set the threshold for porn very high, as is inevitable for a nation where nudity and open-air sex are as normal as flat-pack furniture.

The Brits tend to be a bit more reserved. But our stringent moral standards make us more alert to the perils of lust unconfined.

English viewers, introduced to a bohemian jazz pianist and his bored actress wife at their rural lakeside home, will be inclined to raise a cynical eyebrow when she greets visitors with a cry of, 'Welcome to paradise!'

And when the self-absorbed musician goes off on tour, leaving his lonely, divorced, frustrated best friend at home to keep an eye on the wife, we'll say to ourselves, 'I can see where this is going.'

The Swedes can't. It comes as a complete surprise to David (Gustav Lindh) when he finds himself kissing Marianne (Frida Gustavsson). 

He's baffled when she lends him a book about a menage a trois. And when, one night in the middle of a thunderstorm, she slips into his bedroom wearing a sopping wet nightshirt, he's speechless at the unexpectedness of it all.

Faithless is based on a semi-autobiographical script by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, written near the end of his life and first filmed in 2000 when he was in his 80s.

Bergman said the story was inspired by an affair with a married woman, Gun Hagberg, in the years after World War II: 'Our love tore our hearts apart and from the very beginning carried its own seeds of destruction . . . so wounded that it bled to death.'

Gun became the inspiration for many of the heroines in his films, though another of his muses and lovers, the actress Liv Ullmann, remarked bitterly, 'I don't know what so obsessed him about that relationship because he's met so many women and left so many. He has imparted tragedy in so many lives.'

A six-part series, set in two eras (1977 and the present day), Faithless is a homage to Bergman's bleakly beautiful style of film-making. 

Despite the certainty that it will all end badly for everyone, the opening episode has a heartbreaking naivety — contrasted in the second hour when David, now 50 years older (and played by Jesper Christensen), visits a suicidally unhappy Marianne in a psychiatric hospital.

It's all in Swedish, of course, with subtitles. A story like this could hardly be made in English. We're much too self-conscious to be so unlaced.