Ingmar Bergman was nearly four decades into his brilliant career before touching on his parents' tumultuous marriage in 1983's autobiographical Fanny And Alexander. He announced his retirement from film directing shortly thereafter, but he's revisited the subject three times since as a screenwriter: briefly, in his son Daniel's lyrical Sunday's Children (1992) and at much greater length in two Swedish TV serials, Bille August's The Best Intentions and Liv Ullmann's Private Confessions. Bergman's favorite late-period actress, Ullmann has joined forces with his two most accomplished regulars, actor Max Von Sydow and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, so it's no surprise that Private Confessions hews slavishly to the master's style. Pared down and intimate, with long stretches of dialogue punctuated by wrenching close-ups, the film occasionally captures the raw intensity of Bergman at peak form, but it's curiously strained and inert as a whole, undone by its stifling air of portent. Divided into five conversations of varying chronology—a device that almost certainly played better on television—the first finds an angst-ridden Pernilla August (reprising her role from The Best Intentions) confessing an affair to Von Sydow, her patient and sympathetic priest. Though August's continued pursuit of a young seminarian (Thomas Hanzon) promises to break up her marriage and family, she's advised to tell her husband (Samuel Froler) the truth. Taken alone, the second conversation, in which August comes clean with Froler on a provincial retreat, is a mini-masterpiece, reviving Bergman's long-time obsessions with sex and Christian dogma with fresh, startlingly masochistic immediacy. But Ullmann's severe direction rarely permits this sort of dramatic epiphany. Once it becomes apparent that no more revelations can come from watching this poor woman suffer, Private Confessions offers a masochism all its own.