Cries & Whispers

Cocooned within a shell, an echo chamber close to hell, as your resonance rebounds, and your conscious thoughts just hound; in a prison made so strong, it encases all lifelong, only two ways to escape, one involves a lifelong wait; though you put on a brave face, mask reality with grace, to remain a little distant, the façade is inconsistent; it's the curse of who you are, the situational bazar, as you're nurtured to be who, the polar opposite of you.

Ingrid Thulin is immense, Harriet Andersson is outstanding, Liv Ullmann is brilliant, the direction and cinematography surreal, the story far from pleasant and often full of pain.

If you're sick of the current trend of having movies use a mostly teal color palette with orange for the explosions, then this is the movie for you. Ingmar Bergman and his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, use a palette of red, red, red, red, and red as a backdrop for their story of three sisters in circa-1900 Sweden. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is dying of cancer, and her two sisters Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann) come to comfort her in her final days. Not that they're much comfort, since the whole family is dysfunctional for reasons that are never clearly delineated. And they all have bizarre sexual hangups.

I'm sure I'll be in the minority, but I found that when it comes to dysfunctional families, this movie pales in comparison to Bergman's later Autumn Sonata. There, the characters are real people and it's easy to identify with them. Here, they seem like little more than ciphers standing in for basic human emotions. It doesn't help that the film is grindingly tedious when it isn't being gratuitously creepy (in the creepy old uncle way, not in the horror movie way). What was the point of the "dream" sequence toward the end, anyways? 5/10 for the story, 9/10 for the cinematography, which won Nykvist an Oscar - it's not just the overwhelming use of red that makes the cinematography interesting. Since I think story is worth more than cinematography, at least to me, I give it a six, mainly because it is Bergman and I want to cut him some slack.

The color red holds so many facets of symbolism in this picture. If you've seen Woody Allen's "Manhattan", then you may remember when he called Ingmar Bergman the only person he could truly consider to be a cinematic genius. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bergman digs deep into the human psyche... only he does it cinematically, which is an even greater achievement. This is just one of those rare, important films. *****/*****

Death is one of those things that no one really likes to talk about. When a family member or loved one is terminally ill, the lives of all that surround the individual change, sometimes forever.

This film deals with a terminally ill woman, her devoted servant, and the woman's two sisters, brought together by the tragedy. As the women live through the last days of their dying sister, the superficial layers of each begin to disintegrate, and we eventually see the very core of their being --and it isn't always pretty.

Also not pretty are the deathbed scenes. I found them harrowing, painful and frighteningly realistic. No one at the bedside had any sense of the purpose of so much pain -- not even the priest.

Bergman uses silence like other directors use explosions. The ticking and chiming of the clock are almost startling as time drags on and on. Everyone waits for the inevitable, and the inevitable takes it time.

The cinematography is extraordinary, as is the use of color. Red is used to an almost overwhelming degree, but also used to perfection. When I think of red, several ideas or images come to mind, such as blood, passion, and heat. Each of these are presented in various degrees in this film.

The redeeming figure in this film is the servant. Her love for the dying woman is completely unconditional and selfless. It was for her grief that I wept.

I generally don't like using 'it has its merits' to describe a film. If it's not a backhanded compliment, a diplomatic way of saying 'it doesn't suck eggs but comes awful close to it', then it's just short of that. But 'it has its merits' is all the good will I can muster for a movie where the liveliest thing about it is the fire-engine red of the walls and drapes. A crushing deadly bore for most of its duration, the movie suddenly jumps to life through grotesque shenanigans somewhat atypical for Bergman before settling back to its catatonic stupor. My problem with it is not slowness of pace. If blockbuster extravaganzas where terrorists hold entire cities at ransom and secret agents battle supervillains in space stations orbiting around Earth need a fast breakneck pace to sustain our interest as they sprawl their way around aerial shots of the Pentagon and Monte Carlo, then it's only fair that narrative time be stretched out to allow us to observe the subtle shades and minutest nuances of human psychology. But Cries and Whispers doesn't earn that slow pace. Bergman keeps his usual soliloquys at a bare minimum but doesn't have anything with which to fill that absence. The scene near the end where the two sisters visit dead Agnes in her deathbed hammers home the same point as the entire first half of the film. And how about the denouement with Agnes' reverie in the garden? Was it meant to be cynical (her last happy memory of peace and tranquility was with people who would show indifference and coldness to her in her waning days) or bittersweet hopeful (small moments of happiness is the best one can expect from life but they're worth all the pain and anguish)? Good acting and cinematography aside, such enduring staples in Bergman's career that would more shine with their absence than their presence, the movie doesn't have a particularly profound insight into human nature to depart.