This risque infidelity drama is as Swedish as flat-packed furniture: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Faithless

Faithless (Sky Atlantic)

Rating: Four out of five stars

In the Swedish infidelity drama Faithless, flamboyant filmmaker David says the problem with the British is that they “don’t understand the difference between eroticism and pornography.”

This comes from a man whose first film was a love story set in a brothel where a soldier falls in love with one of the prostitutes. ‘We are afraid of neither sex nor violence!’ David’s producer says he’s excited about the script.

But that’s for you Swedes. They set the porn threshold very high, as is inevitable for a nation where nudity and outdoor sex are as normal as takeaway furniture.

British people tend to be a little more reserved. But our strict moral standards make us more alert to the dangers of unrestrained lust.

Meeting a bohemian jazz pianist and his bored actress wife at their rural lakeside home, British viewers greet visitors with ‘Welcome to paradise!’ They will tend to raise a sarcastic eyebrow when you greet him/her.

And when the selfish musician goes on tour, leaving his lonely, divorced, frustrated best friend at home to watch over his wife, we’ll say to ourselves: ‘I can see where this is going.’

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

He is surprised when she lends him a book about a menage a trois. And when she walks into her bedroom one night, in the middle of a storm, wearing a soaking wet nightgown, she is left speechless by the unexpectedness of it all.

Unbeliever is based on a semi-autobiographical screenplay written by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman towards the end of his life and first shot in 2000, when he was in his 80s.

Bergman said the story was inspired by an affair with a married woman named Gun Hagberg in the years after World War II: ‘Our love tore our hearts and carried its own seeds of destruction from the very beginning. . . ‘He was so injured that he bled to death.’

Gun inspired many of the heroines in his films, but actress Liv Ullmann, one of his muses and lovers, bitterly said: ‘I don’t know what it was about this relationship that made him so obsessed because he met so many women and broke up with so many women. ‘He brought tragedy to so many lives.’

A six-episode series set in two eras (1977 and present), Faithless is a tribute to Bergman’s bleakly beautiful style of filmmaking.

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

It’s all in Swedish, of course, with subtitles. It is unlikely that such a story could be written in English. We are too conscious to be this disconnected.