Choices

Rating:
Summary: Once the curtain falls
Review: The second autobiography by Liv Ullmann may be even better than the first, "Changing." This one, "Choices," is a more deeply personal memoir and tugs a lot more at the heartstrings, with tales of her roles as mother and lover, and her work for the poor.

Ullmann describes in quiet detail her work for UNICEF, travelling to places like Haiti and Manila. She also describes her relationship with her teenage daughter Linn, who blossoms from a sullen kid to a young woman; and an affair with a man she calls Abel, who moves to be with her, but whose love for her isn't enough. She describes working in the theatre. And finally, the then-forty-year-old Ullmann reflects on life, on time gone by, and the people she cares about.

Ullmann is older and wiser in "Choices." Hollywood was a thing of the past, although she was still acting at the time this was written. This isn't so much an actor's biography as the biography of a kind, charitable woman whose heart seems to bleed for every starved child and crippled old person she meets around the world. The only detailed writing in the whole book (aside from nature descriptions) is how she describes the lost, forgotten people who can't get medical care, food or water.

"Choices" is also endowed with the sort of in-the-moment anecdotes, that makes you feel like Ullmann is handing out snapshots of her life -- her breakups, her safari with her young daughter, her work on an Ibsen play, and even how a rusty old wok hinted at a future breakup. She takes some looks backward in time as well, at her mother and grandmother, and at her daughter's time with her father.

"But within this framework I have choices, and I am described by the way I make or neglect them." So says Ullmann, with the certainty of a woman who has made her "Choices."