Cries & Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop, Sweden, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Siv Lundgren

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin, Ingrid Bergman

Cries & Whispers is the first movie I saw by director and writer Ingmar Bergman, largely on the strength of its Oscar win—I still believed in the Academy Awards then, even if this one was only for cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who deserved the accolades, of course). I was still a teenager, but aware of Bergman’s outsize reputation for art films. I didn’t like this one much. The heavy-handed extremes felt forced or showy and in general it was way too slow. I tried it a couple more times over the years but have never warmed to it much even as I fell in love with a bunch of Bergman’s other stuff: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, etc.

So I was prepared for something like an hour and a half of tedium, a study in formal miserablism, when I sat down to look at it again. It’s heavy on the red. Red furniture. Red wallpaper. Red drapes. Fade to red. Blood, of course, but that comes later. The story involves three 30something middle-class sisters, one of whom is dying. That’s Agnes (Harriet Andersson), attended by her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Maybe I finally grew up enough, but for the first time this death of Agnes and all her suffering and agonies that precede it finally reached me and I started preparing myself to backtrack and praise the movie. Harriet Andersson is stunningly good.

The Heart of the Matter (1948)

I’ve read a few Graham Greene novels along the way and thought I knew what I was in for with this highly rated one. But it was a disappointment, a cheap, sour, and bleak romance. It reminded me too much of Ernest Hemingway and his eternal stoic stone face intended to represent some kind of nobility. I thought of two other writers much better at what I expected from Greene: Georges Simenon’s so-called “hard” novels (e.g., Tropic Moon and I want to get to more) and South African J.M. Coetzee, a master at compressed language and terrible developments. Greene is not high on colonialism as a general rule, but he is by comparison with Simenon and Coetzee. In The Heart of the Matter a middle-aged policeman at an African outpost is in a loveless marriage and, improbably enough, finds himself in a lousy affair with a widow more than 30 years younger. I suppose these things happen, and speak to some of the basic problems with colonialism. The sweltering weather is often noticed—even light caresses start the sweat going. Our guy’s wife is also having an affair, with a junior officer who hates him. “Syrians” are all over the place, lying, blackmailing, smuggling. Unclear where they are in the World War II setting. Not particularly with the Allies. Another detail I found annoying was Catholic religion, taken seriously by our (philandering) guy and his (philandering) wife. For example, it’s a major crisis for him when he does not confess everything in a confessional but still takes communion afterward. This is a grave problem for him. His girlfriend doesn’t get it and neither do I, frankly. And you really should get it for the ending to land as hard as I think Greene wants it to, and apparently does for others. I appreciate how meticulously structured it is to deliver maximum bleak, but you have to buy the whole Catholic thread more than I could. Also, as these people seem to be WASPy Brits, I assume it must mean something specific that they’re Roman Catholics and not Church of England, but I don’t know what that is and am not interested enough at the moment to try chasing it down. I’m not even convinced this is one of Greene’s best, let alone one of the best novels of the 20th century as per Modern Library.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“What Was It?” (1859)

Fitz-James O’Brien was among the earliest writers of horror stories but died in the US Civil War at the age of 34 and didn’t leave many stories behind. I found this one in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell is typically effusive, calling O’Brien the heir apparent to Edgar Allan Poe. And it’s a pretty good story—I like O’Brien’s clean and straightforward language (for the 19th century). A couple problems, the first of which is foreshadowed in Hartwell’s intro, and that is that it is rotten with explanation. It’s also a typical early horror story in that it doesn’t try hard to scare and it does try hard to soothe. That is, merely mentioning strange supernatural details is considered sufficient to provoke anxiety. We are all generally more corrupted by now and need more effects to goose us up such as jump-scares. I thought the story’s most interesting point was the invisibility of the phenomenon, whether ghost or extra-dimensional creature or whatever. The idea was popular in the late 19th century, with Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, and others chipping in their versions. As an effect, interest in it seemed to be done by the early 20th century, perhaps marked by H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man (and the 1930s Universal movie based on it). As a kid, I ranked invisibility high among my desired superpowers, but the impulse was (and probably would be still) voyeuristic. As for encountering some invisible thing, yes, as described here, it would certainly be creepy and disturbing. But I can’t say it’s ever been the stuff of my nightmares, sleeping or waking. “What Was It?” covers most of its bases pretty well, but I thought O’Brien missed a trick by not using flour to make the thing more visible. Instead, they used the bedsheets to get a general idea of what they were dealing with, and later plaster for more specific details. I guess that works too. Hartwell also identifies O’Brien as a pioneer in science fiction at least as much as horror, and in many ways this story does feel closer to SF. My problem with taking it as horror is the whole invisibility thing. It’s just not something that seems very effective to me. In fact, the story reminds me a lot of Maupassant’s “Horla” stories, equally weak sauce or more so. “What Was It?” is probably the best of the invisibility-themed stories I’ve read so far—I still need to get to the Wells—and I think it may be the earliest of them all. Is invisibility as a horror idea all played out now or is that me? It’s hard to think of examples after about 1910. I don’t think H.P. Lovecraft even tried it.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

There are a number of things about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that I’m not sure I understand, notably the title and some of the details in the opening scene. For me the picture falls into a genre of “film festival movies,” proved out by the awards it has won from Cannes, Chicago, London, and other film festivals. The opening scene is vividly, self-consciously visual: Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning home at night from a costume party. She wears a spangled helmet with dark glasses and an outfit that looks like inflated parachute fabric. She notices a body lying in the deserted and lonely highway. It is her Uncle Fred and he’s dead. Then Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) shows up. She appears drunk, knocking at the window of Shula’s car, but Shula ignores her. Lots of activity and visuals here, but the point of the movie has little to do with how Uncle Fred died on that highway, something we never learn. Instead, what we learn is that Uncle Fred was a rapist who preyed on female members of his extended family, often when they were underage. Guinea Fowl affirms how universal this type of domestic abuse is, reaching into Zambia, Africa, in much the same way that Women Talking witnessed it in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s not just Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the US—it’s everywhere. Some of the reasons it continues are shown in Guinea Fowl. The women of the extended family, all the aunties, blame Uncle Fred’s widow because she would not cook for him. It makes no sense, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Thus, director and writer Rungano Nyoni offers a panoramic view of these crimes and family responses. Shula knows better than the aunties that it is Uncle Fred who is responsible for what he has done and no one else. But she’s in the minority. As the movie goes along, more and more victims come forward with their stories. One of the girls, Bupe (Esther Sangini), tries to tell her mother in a video she records on her phone what Uncle Fred did to her, but her mother doesn’t want to hear it or believe it. For that generation, the sole tragedy here is that Uncle Fred has died. As for Bupe: “He’s dead now,” she says. “So it’s OK.” On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marred slightly by distractions such as the opening scene that I don’t really see as necessary. But it has a familiar (and depressing) story to tell, it sticks close to the truths of sexual abuse, and the performances are great across the board, a winning ensemble. The picture won awards from film festivals because it deserves them even if it’s not the most artfully written screenplay. Check it out if it makes your local film festival. It’s also on HBO Max.