BERGMAN'S SHOES FIT ULLMANN IN 'FAITHLESS'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Ingmar Bergman stopped directing films some 17 years ago. But the great Swedish angst master has continued to produce screenplays - most of them as personal and searingly, psychologically insightful as those for his finest movies - that the cream of Scandinavian filmmaking talent have brought to the screen with varying degrees of ponderousness and profundity.

I daresay that with her second try, ``Faithless,'' Bergman's greatest actress, Liv Ullmann, has done the trick better than anybody since the genius beast himself last sat behind the camera. That means that ``Faithless'' plays most like a Bergman film - and most specifically, the lacerating Ullmann starrer ``Scenes From a Marriage'' - but it also, crucially, looks like one, with its bold emphasis on confessional talking faces (or, as in the case of other Bergman regular Erland Josephson, faces stricken by pain into eloquently expressive silence) and repeated returns to the bleak, Faroe Island beachfront that was a favorite Bergman location.

Mainly, though, the Bergman magic is imparted through ``Faithless' '' stirring interplay of memory, passion, the agony of both and the trouble of dragging such things through a brutally honest creative process.

Josephson plays an aged filmmaker called, well, Bergman, who preparing to write a new scenario, summons ghosts to his neat, blond-wood-paneled study to lead him on a tour of the adulterous triangle that is the subject of his story - in excruciating but thoroughly illuminating detail.

The primary spirit guide is an actress named Marianne (Lena Endre), who - in a near-perfectly judged balance of spoken word narration and staged flashbacks - takes us and the increasingly appalled writer through the emotional carnage of what started out as a pointless, thoughtless fling.

When they were all around the age of 40, Marianne cheated on her conductor husband Markus (Thomas Hanzon) with their best friend, an uninspired, twice-divorced theater director named David (Krister Henriksson). The why remains, of course, mysterious; Markus is a good husband whose only apparent negative is occasional absences when his orchestra tours, and the couple is shown to have a satisfying sex life. Marianne even initially dismisses as ridiculous David's first, clumsy come-on.

But a liaison in Paris proves overwhelming, and once back in Stockholm, David and Marianne can't refrain from carrying on their illicit romance. What's love got to do with it? At one point, in lines only Bergman could write with such incisive insight, Marianne muses that, if she weren't so morally indoctrinated, enjoying both husband and lover would be a totally excellent experience.

Of course, after Markus learns the (virtually) naked truth about the affair, things do not go well. He uses custody of their increasingly withdrawn young daughter Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo) as a bludgeon to torment and then blackmail Marianne in the most despicable way, while David's innate fecklessness comes to the fore when she needs his support the most. Toward the end, matters spiral along the melodramatically depressive course that only Scandinavian movies can take with a straight face, but the film nonetheless maintains, to its bitter end, a superb balance of empathy for its tortured protagonists and clear-headed judgments that their own actions are what brought these people to such sorry passes.

And all of this is done so, so sublimely. Rarely, especially since Bergman's retirement to the stage and his writing room, have such harrowing emotional trials hit the screen with an equally exhilarating force of honesty and humanity.

The travails of Marianne and company reportedly are based on one of the many affairs the author himself was involved in around the middle of the last century. Having had her own wrenching relationship with her former director, Ullmann navigates this mined behavioral terrain with the surety that only comes from unforgettable experience.

In the end, obviously, Josephson's devastated ``Bergman'' is hardly writing a fiction, but autobiography. Whether his story is David's, Markus' or Marianne's - or something of all of theirs - is another tantalizingly elusive element that makes this long life's journey into the uncertain night of love and betrayal a film that it's impossible to turn your eyes away from.

``FAITHLESS''

(Rated R: sex, nudity, language, violence)

The stars: Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon, Michelle Gylemo.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Liv Ullmann. Written by Ingmar Bergman. Produced by Kaj Larsen. Released by Samuel Godwyn Films.

Running time: Two hours, 22 minutes.

Playing: Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Royal, West L.A.

Our rating: Three and one half stars

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Photo: Marianne (Lena Endre) has an affair with divorced theater director David (Krister Henriksson) in ``Faithless.''