REVIEWS
"Bergman's script takes the story of his parents' relationship further on from
The Best Intentions—August and Fröler reprise their roles as his mother and father—in this absorbing, if somewhat foursquare study of infidelity and self-knowledge. When Anna tells her clergyman uncle Jacob (
Sydow) that she's having an affair with a much younger seminary student, the confession initiates a series of five conversations, ranging back and forth in time, in which her desire to escape the bonds of marriage is contrasted against both the disillusioned compromise later required to sustain the union, and the bright questioning spirit displayed in her early confirmation classes. Under
Ullmann's over-studious direction, the pieces take their time to fall into place (though the original television version ran 200 minutes), but the actors clearly respond, August conveying the turmoil of a woman trapped by circumstances and her own febrile emotions,
Sydow a figure of towering moral authority and compassion."
— Trevor Johnston, Time Out
"
Private Confessions was scripted by the retired Ingmar Bergman, who seems to delight in having other filmmakers expand on his parents' private lives. Pernilla August and Samuel Froler reprise the roles of Anna and Henrik Bergman they played in Bille August's 1989
The Best Intentions, with Bergman standby
Max von Sydow as the father-confessor around whom the film is structured.
Liv Ullmann, in her third directorial outing, treats her mentor's parents' lives with suitable reverence, which includes fidelity to the script's many ironies. And as if there weren't enough Bergmanites on the set, the film's awash in
Sven Nykvist's northern light. Yet
Private Confessions doesn't feel like a Bergman film. It's far more grounded and slier, and it's ambivalent in emotional rather than intellectual ways. The movie, cut down from a longer TV version, is set up as a series of five 'confessions' whose achronological sequence calls into question the 'truth' being confessed.
Ullmann isn't particularly interested in the angst of human interaction or the difficulty of knowing truth; she seems fascinated by the pathos of feelings that are all the more intense for being of questionable integrity."
— Ronnie Scheib, Chicago Reader
