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.
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.
For that matter, the whole cast is great—Ullmann and Thulin were long-time members of the pool of actors Bergman tended to reach for (Bergman and Ullmann became involved, lived together from about 1965 to 1970, and had a daughter). Erland Josephson and Georg Arlin are two more familiar faces from Bergman’s long career. The problems stem more directly from Bergman’s screenplay, which amounts to a matched pair of existential chamber dramas. I’m really not sure what Cries & Whispers is “about.” On its most superficial level it is about the tensions within a bourgeois family, placid perhaps on the Nordic exterior, but seething with rage that erupts in the most private humiliating moments. OK, that’s fine, but do you have to go so far? The cringing extremes are so extreme they verge on laughable, e.g., the most horrific, a cutting scene with a denouement so theatrical it undercuts what I still think was necessary anyway only if you believe a person like Karin could exist. Which is not easy. Her type, yes, but not this exaggerated.
The Agnes death scenes are overdone too—notably a sexual tension with Anna—but Andersson puts them over. It’s never specified what is killing her. Cancer seems likely. It’s beside the point, which is her suffering, agonizing to witness. Everything works together to make these scenes, this first half of the movie, remarkably powerful. What this part is “about” is more plain: facing death. It’s done sympathetically but candidly. It’s a reasonable approximation of what it can look like. It’s an experience so universal it can’t fail to reach a lot of folks, extremes and all.
Agnes dies at the halfway point and you have to wonder what is coming next, it has been so riveting to this point. But then the picture starts to amble more aimlessly—aimless, but full of provocations and pose. These elements are there in the first half too, with Anna, and in a flashback when Maria remembers her ex-husband Joakim (Henning Moritzen) attempting suicide seppuku style. Visually arresting yet too improbable for me, as are most of Bergman’s attempts at shock here. It might even be fair to classify Cries & Whispers as a kind of elegiac horror (a type of horror extremely limited and mostly involving vampires).
There is the battle of closeups, full-on and in profile, with Ullmann and Thulin, who are less Maria and Karin and more Ullmann and Thulin. (Glamorous. Wins you an Oscar.) This is resorted to more than once. Meanwhile, Karin is high-strung to say the least. She’s the one most obviously seething with rage. She reacts badly to being touched, apparently does not want to be touched at all. Again, I’m not sure these exaggerations are helping. And then, finally, there is Agnes the talking corpse. These scenes where Karin, Maria, and Anna troop in to the bedroom where Agnes's body lies for a conversation with Agnes. Yes, there is more to learn about these characters and it is a deepening of them but by this point, wincing and a little numbed perhaps by the cutting scene, I have a persistent problem going with suspension of disbelief.
This time around it occurred to me that these closing scenes feel a lot like the closing scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (and not Ordet, as you might think). Beautiful in their way but burdened by an annoying inscrutability. I think Cries & Whispers is more a case of “flawed by its own hubris” compared to, say, “flawed by exuberant experimentation,” as in Hour of the Wolf or Shame, which have considerably less stature than Cries & Whispers but are much better and more interesting. Cries & Whispers is overrated, I guess I’m saying, but worth a look for that first half.
The Agnes death scenes are overdone too—notably a sexual tension with Anna—but Andersson puts them over. It’s never specified what is killing her. Cancer seems likely. It’s beside the point, which is her suffering, agonizing to witness. Everything works together to make these scenes, this first half of the movie, remarkably powerful. What this part is “about” is more plain: facing death. It’s done sympathetically but candidly. It’s a reasonable approximation of what it can look like. It’s an experience so universal it can’t fail to reach a lot of folks, extremes and all.
Agnes dies at the halfway point and you have to wonder what is coming next, it has been so riveting to this point. But then the picture starts to amble more aimlessly—aimless, but full of provocations and pose. These elements are there in the first half too, with Anna, and in a flashback when Maria remembers her ex-husband Joakim (Henning Moritzen) attempting suicide seppuku style. Visually arresting yet too improbable for me, as are most of Bergman’s attempts at shock here. It might even be fair to classify Cries & Whispers as a kind of elegiac horror (a type of horror extremely limited and mostly involving vampires).
There is the battle of closeups, full-on and in profile, with Ullmann and Thulin, who are less Maria and Karin and more Ullmann and Thulin. (Glamorous. Wins you an Oscar.) This is resorted to more than once. Meanwhile, Karin is high-strung to say the least. She’s the one most obviously seething with rage. She reacts badly to being touched, apparently does not want to be touched at all. Again, I’m not sure these exaggerations are helping. And then, finally, there is Agnes the talking corpse. These scenes where Karin, Maria, and Anna troop in to the bedroom where Agnes's body lies for a conversation with Agnes. Yes, there is more to learn about these characters and it is a deepening of them but by this point, wincing and a little numbed perhaps by the cutting scene, I have a persistent problem going with suspension of disbelief.
This time around it occurred to me that these closing scenes feel a lot like the closing scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (and not Ordet, as you might think). Beautiful in their way but burdened by an annoying inscrutability. I think Cries & Whispers is more a case of “flawed by its own hubris” compared to, say, “flawed by exuberant experimentation,” as in Hour of the Wolf or Shame, which have considerably less stature than Cries & Whispers but are much better and more interesting. Cries & Whispers is overrated, I guess I’m saying, but worth a look for that first half.
No comments:
Post a Comment