Ominous Appetites.

Even though he only wrote it, and didn't direct it, Faithless may be Ingmar Bergman's most personal film. But then, it was directed by Liv Ullmann, who has known him as intimately and as long as anyone. The film deals with a painful story from Bergman's past that seems to have been a thorn in his side. In many of his films, Bergman has allowed bits of it to dribble out, but here he confronts it head-on with an expiating heart. He concentrates on the woman he wronged, a long-ago mistress now dead. Miss Ullmann, herself a longtime former mistress, who contributes much more than routine direction, was the right person to add the woman's-eye view.

Faithless is the tale of the happily married Marianne, an actress (Lena Endre); her husband, Markus, a world-famous conductor (Thomas Hanzon); and David, a stage and screen director, and their closest friend (Krister Henriksson). Out of this true friendship, there evolves a treacherous triangle with tragic consequences. When Marianne gets a scholarship to study theater in Paris, the divorced and womanizing David, on a pretext, joins her there for three weeks of overflowing passion in a small hotel. But the affair continues back in Stockholm, where it wreaks havoc on all involved, not least on Marianne's nine- year-old daughter Isabelle (touchingly played by Michelle Gylemo).

I do not wish to give away a plot full of ominous, even lethal, surprises. But I must state that nobody is entirely innocent here; before two and one-half hours elapse, everyone will have betrayed everyone else with disastrous results, in a story that, like a trick box, has many false bottoms. Still, it is the woman who comes off best: the only one who acts from genuine passion, whose instincts are mostly good, who seems capable of sustaining a relationship, and whose love for her daughter never wavers.

Bergman's strategy is fascinating. The story is told, basically, from the point of view of the lonely old writer, called Bergman, who lives (like Ingmar) on the isolated island of Faro. This writer is going over his diaries, perhaps to write a book; to help him do so, he conjures up the image of the dead woman he calls Marianne Vogler (a name recurrent in Bergman's oeuvre), and lets her take over the storytelling. This memory-Marianne that comes to partly independent life for him says, near the end, "I do not much like your Marianne," adding yet another dimension to the story, another bottom to the box. Indeed, that there are trendily ambiguous counterindications that this may be a real woman impersonating Marianne for Bergman is the only thing I don't like about the film.

Old Bergman is played-largely in grieving, open-mouthed silence-by the admirable Erland Josephson, as the film shuttles between Bergman and Marianne in the present, and Marianne, Markus, and David (Bergman as a youngish man) in the past. Intercut, too, are moments from the Faro seashore, shots of exquisite beauty from the camera of the splendid Jorgen Persson, best remembered hereabouts for his work on Elvira Madigan. One of the film's remarkable features is the preponderance of scenes tightly confined within four walls, yet such is Persson's artistry with light and shadow and shades of color that his cinematography contributes as much emotion as some filmmakers' entire movies. All the actors excel, but the triumph is that of Lena Endre, whose Marianne transcends even what Bergman profoundly wrote and Ullmann magisterially directed. Endre's performance may well be the greatest by an actress on film known to me, and beggars attempts to translate it into words.

Miss Endre is, offscreen, a warm, charming, intelligent, and understatedly lovely fortyish woman. Onscreen, she becomes all women of all ages, and in all modes that ever were: from surpassing beauty, through heartbreaking common humanity, all the way to the distorted, frightening visages of extreme rage and crushing agony. Of course, she acts with every part of her lissome body, and her low, slightly husky, hypnotic voice-both in dialogue and in extensive narration-is irresistible.

But the great, unforgettable thing about Miss Endre is her face. Throughout the film she wears several different hairdos, some of which- pushed forward loosely, pulled back, or spread across a pillow-multiply her looks further. She becomes-though not only through them-many different women, from the trusting schoolgirl to the unleashed bacchante, from the voluptuously womanly to the savagely martyred, from blissfully transfigured to distorted with ineffable pain. Everything about this face is miraculous: the perfect oval, the noble brow, the eloquent eyebrows, the aristocratic nose, the full mouth that speaks no less in silence or in little inchoate sounds of dolor or delight.

Supreme, however, are the eyes-those enormous-seeming, bottomless eyes. Their gaze comes from unsoundable depths and sees far beyond its immediate object. There is, even in happiness, a soupcon of sadness in it, as if aware of the fragility of joy, of the danger, deceptions, and death lying in wait. These eyes alone, at the thin frontier between bright wonder and the tragic sense of life, warrant seeing the film a second time. Lena Endre will make all women viewers proud of their womanhood, and all men a little more loving toward their women for being her sisters.

-Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, is a sorry thing indeed. The earlier movie, admittedly based on a better novel, was directed more subtly by Jonathan Demme, using more suggestion. Ridley Scott merely revels in gore. The screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian tries hard to be both scary and smart-aleck, but cannot even cover up gaping holes in the plot. To think that Hannibal Lecter, who in the novel had plastic surgery on his face but in the movie looks like the same old Anthony Hopkins, would go unrecognized in tourist- filled Florence, even under the name Dr. Fell (of "I do not like thee" fame), is in itself preposterous.

It doesn't help, either, that the rather too genteel Julianne Moore (Jodie Foster having sensibly abstained) makes a much less persuasive Clarice Starling, and that Hopkins himself has used up his old bag of tricks. As the contemptible Justice Department guy who makes Clarice's life miserable, Ray Liotta gives an uncharacteristically miserable performance, but then Scott is a poor director with actors. In smaller roles, fine actors like Zeljko Ivanek and Enrico Lo Verso are wasted. The only effective work comes from Giancarlo Giannini, who has aged well and shines even in a dumb part, and the uncredited Gary Oldman, who does another of his good and creepy jobs.

The nice thing is that much of Hannibal takes place in Florence, whose stones are as photogenic as ever, even if Hans Zimmer's nauseatingly pretentious and persistent score does its best to ruin it for us. A special sheet in the press kit asked us not to give away the ending: I myself would be happy to give away the whole blamed thing, if I thought there would be any takers.