A Drama of Death in Vivid Color
Ingmar Bergman’s red-hued ‘Cries and Whispers,’ starring Harriet Andersson as a woman in the terminal stages of cancer, sustains a haunting, dream-like mood as it attends to its anguished characters
Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann in the award-winning Swedish filmPHOTO: MOVIESTORE/SHUTTERSTOCK
By Peter Cowie
Dec. 30, 2022 4:21 pm ETSAVEPRINTTEXT
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Fifty years ago this month, “Cries and Whispers,” Ingmar Bergman’s most unexpected masterpiece, opened in New York. Despite his global fame, Bergman found himself in 1971 without financial support for his films, after what he himself described as “a row of semi-failures.” So he persuaded his principal actors to invest their fees as shareholders, and then borrowed half a million crowns (about $100,000 at the time) from the Swedish Film Institute. The gamble proved a triumph. “Cries and Whispers” performed better than any previous Bergman movie at the U.S. box office and earned an Oscar for cinematographer Sven Nykvist, as well as four more Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture).
“Cries and Whispers” unfolds at the end of the 19th century, in a country manor owned by Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is in the terminal stages of cancer. Her sisters, Maria and Karin, watch over her, along with a faithful maidservant, Anna.
Ever since childhood, Bergman had “pictured the interior of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red,” as he wrote in the introduction to the screenplay. “Cries and Whispers” is suffused with multiple tones of red—crimson, rose-pink, vermilion, orange-red, and the ruby of wine that, like blood, is spilled more than once during the film. Against this is set the intense white of dresses and shrouds associated with death.
Throughout his life, Bergman dreamed vividly and would jot down his phantasms immediately on waking each day. The tone and pace of “Cries and Whispers” belong to a dream—or, rather, a nightmare. Nykvist’s camera glides and pivots like a voyeur among the rooms of the manor, and Bergman embellishes the mood with abstract sights and sounds: the parkland in the mist of morning, the tick and ping of numerous clocks, the languid melancholy of a Chopin mazurka.
It’s a film about faces—faces that map emotions, but also faces that serve to mask the soul-image of each character. Nykvist’s cinematography renders these features with sculptural precision. It’s also a film about siblings and the often deep-seated distress of kinship. The wanton Maria (Liv Ullmann) and her icy, ascetic sister Karin (Ingrid Thulin) achieve some kind of reconciliation in the aftermath of Agnes’s passing. The need for human contact, for tenderness, for affection, is accentuated by the imminence of death. The intimate, sensual bond between Agnes and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan) offers a ray of catharsis that offsets the prevailing gloom of the narrative.
Bergman’s primary skill lies in keeping the audience in a state of suspense while he touches on the most perplexing of themes. On vanity, for example, in a brilliant scene when the family doctor (Erland Josephson) relentlessly describes and dissects Maria’s self-conceit as she looks into a mirror. On lost childhood, as the camera lovingly discovers Maria’s dollhouse and watches her in bed, sucking her thumb like an infant. Or on what C.S. Lewis called “the problem of pain,” as the chaplain delivers an anguished homily over Agnes’s corpse, seemingly bewildered by the motives of a God who has permitted such suffering; and as Anna, praying in her room, stoically accepts the loss of her child at an unexpectedly early age.
The men in “Cries and Whispers” appear craven and hapless by turns, incapable of benevolence, and smugly confident that their patriarchal position will never be threatened. Both Maria and Karin, however, rebel against their husbands in ways that are subtle and drastic. The women in Bergman’s world always show themselves made of sturdier stuff than their menfolk.
Each actor brings a special flavor to the handful of characters. Ms. Andersson, no longer the rebellious young star of “Summer With Monika” (1953), brings an authentic charge to the role of Agnes—a name meaning pure, or holy, in its original Greek form. As her diary reveals, Agnes belongs among the most admirable of all Bergman’s characters, enduring waves of agony in order to arrive at emotional fulfillment. Ms. Ullmann, whose long personal relationship with Bergman had ended two years earlier, brings a catlike guile to the role of Maria, who all but seduces her sister Karin, only to reject her coldly at the end. Thulin, a veteran of Bergman’s great films of the 1950s, reveals layers of complexity in the personality of Karin, while Ms. Sylwan little by little becomes a saint-like figure, the only one who comforts Agnes in her death throes.
Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, hailed the film as “magnificent, moving, and very mysterious,” but Andrew Sarris, in the Village Voice, wrote that “Cries and Whispers” was “a pastiche of old Bergmannerisms, some tried and true, but most merely trying.” Fifty years on, however, the formal beauty and underlying passion of the film have sustained its stature. Bergman’s work, like fine wine, matures with the passing of time.
Mr. Cowie has written more than 30 books on the cinema, including biographical studies of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola.
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