Cries and Whispers
Viskningar och rop
Ingmar Bergman (1972)
The two nouns are reversed in the Swedish title, which might have included ‘heavy breathing’ too. Although Cries and Whispers includes wonderful things, a second viewing confirmed that it’s not among my favourite Bergman films. (I also have a prejudice against it as the first picture I saw at the NFT that got a round of applause. As I’d already seen and admired several other films in the 2003 Bergman season that were denied the audience reaction given to Cries and Whispers, it left me with the suspicion that a main cause of NFT-BFI acclaim is an audience’s need for self-congratulation when they’ve sat through something gruelling.) Set in a manor house at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the film concerns the psyches and relationships of three sisters and their maid. The spinster Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who has never left the family home, is dying of cancer; her two unhappily married sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), have returned to the manor house to be with her. Agnes is also attended by the family’s loyal servant, Anna (Kari Sylwan). Bergman is a great interpreter of death: in Cries and Whispers, he describes both the process of dying and psychic death-in-life (one of the surviving sisters refers to her state of mind as ‘being in hell’). He’s more successful with the former than the latter.
The colour scheme, memorably rendered through Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, is dominated by black, white and red. Except for occasional, astonishing images where the grey-pink flesh tones suggest the texture as well as the colour of Old Master paintings, the less salient hues and patterns of clothes and furnishings are overpowered, sometimes barely noticeable. Within this scheme, each sister has a predominant colour of dress which represents the core of her personality – Karin/black, Agnes/white, Maria/red. From the point at which Karin inserts a piece of broken glass into her genitals to avoid having sex with her husband and tauntingly smears blood on her face when he arrives at the bedside, the redness in the film takes on a definitely menstrual quality. Since the walls of the rooms in the manor house are often red and scene after scene dissolves into red the effect is strongly claustrophobic too.
The process of Agnes’ death is compelling to watch, largely thanks to Harriet Andersson. On our first sight of her, Agnes is waking up and, as she comes to consciousness, we see her realising anew her situation. Throughout her time on screen (roughly the first half of Cries and Whispers), Andersson shifts imperceptibly but unmistakably between smiling lovingly at and talking sociably with her sisters and Anna; and lapsing back into fearful awareness that death is approaching – and being racked with the pain that wrenches from her the most resonant cries in the film. They also generate a tremendous sense of relief when the pain subsides and Agnes quietens. She is the outstanding presence in the world of Cries and Whispers. The moment of her death – the moment which creates Agnes’ absolute absence – is done with extraordinary delicacy. It arrives so suddenly and quietly that it is, in the fullest sense, breathtaking. In her agony especially, Agnes is so vividly present that, when she enters the void, she leaves one too: the film is never the same after Agnes has died, except for one sequence. Thanks to the beautiful impact of Harriet Andersson’s acting, we keep remembering Agnes – this chimes with the sense that a residue persists in the house that she never left in life and, in combination with the extraordinary rhythm that Bergman creates, allows us to accept Agnes’ return from the dead. ‘I am so tired’, she tells Anna, ‘but I cannot leave you all’.
There’s a more negative reason, however, for Agnes’ reappearance being real (within the planes of being that Bergman evokes – which include a dreamlike dimension). After she’s died, the interactions between Karin and Maria are relatively very weak. And their, and Anna’s, interactions with the revenant Agnes are thinly predictable, epitomising as they do the essential (you might say the only) qualities of the women. Harsh, loveless Karin rejects her returned sister; shallow, selfish Maria appears ready to accept her but recoils from Agnes’ embrace. The peasant Anna, with her unquestioning Christian faith and devotion to her mistress, lies on the bed – in the film’s most (and rightly) famous image – baring her breast and with Agnes lying against her. The arrangement evokes the pietà (and thus both connects with and transcends the cold white statuary elsewhere in the house). The tones and substances of the two women’s flesh contrast the living and the (un)dead. This passage certainly evokes the moral starkness and clarity of Bible stories or other myths (or fairy tales) but, by this point in the film, we’ve seen and heard too much from Karin and Maria for the episode to have the power that it should have.
Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin are remarkable camera subjects but that’s also the problem with their performances: rather than bringing flesh-and-blood women to life, they seem merely to be animating and detailing the images that Bergman has created from them: Thulin’s self-hating, mask-like expression becomes particularly, oppressively tedious. And because these are such insistent, one-note characters, whose thoughts we can read on their faces, there’s no need for the two women to deliver home truths about each other to each other: when Karin and Maria go at each verbally, the effect is tautological (and verging on boring). Sometimes, Bergman seems to be working in an art form that isn’t cinema – or that might have worked better in silent cinema. When Karin tells Maria, ‘I don’t like being touched’, Maria is determined to test the claim, and the pair go into a pantomime of touching and resistance to touch. This feels akin to ballet, where it’s conventional to establish a mood or emotion through lengthy elaboration. The artificiality of these exchanges has a destructive effect – during them, you suspend disbelief in the look of the film, notice the artfulness of the design in a way that you don’t in the stronger parts.
As in the later Autumn Sonata, the men – the two husbands (George Arlin and Henning Moritzen) and the doctor (Erland Josephson) anyway – are marginal figures. The only male character who makes an impression (a bad one) is the priest Isak (Anders Ek), who comes to the house to lead prayers for the soul of Agnes, and reveals that the dead woman had a faith much stronger than his own. The increasingly unbelieving man of God played by Gunnar Björnstrand in Winter Light is one of Bergman’s finest creations but Isak makes no sense. While you don’t expect realism in a Bergman film, the idea of a priest coming into a home and voicing this kind of religious doubt in the late nineteenth century is improbable – objectionably so, because it’s obvious that Bergman isn’t interested in the character beyond his acting as a mouthpiece for the writer-director’s own agnostic anxiety.
In one of the two extended flashbacks describing the matrimonial traumas of Karin and Maria, the former dines with her husband. The couple sit miles away from each other at the opposite ends of a long table: he is a cold fish and, just in case we missed that, he is eating fish, in a vaguely displeased way – while his wife fiddles nervously with a glass of wine, which shatters. (In spite of the fish, it’s blood-red wine she’s been drinking.) As Karin plays thoughtfully with a shard of glass, you know it will come in handy later and it does, for the self-mutilation that thwarts her husband’s expectations of sex with his wife. The richly decorated angst of Cries and Whispers increasingly pushes Bergman towards the edge of self-parody: certainly this is the kind of piece which his detractors can have fun with as the epitome of self-indulgent, gothic miserabilism. Yet he never quite goes over the edge. In spite of the overly schematic definition of the sisters’ essences, their physicality is often rendered in extraordinary ways. When Karin undresses with the help of Anna, the tension between her cold contempt for the maid and Karin’s nakedness in Anna’s presence is remarkable (and strengthened by the many layers and items of clothing she has to remove).
The physical setting and the lighting of the film are in a sense very obvious but they’re deeply effective. Cries and Whispers begins with an orchestra of clocks. The ticking is sinister and mortiferous but the look of the timepieces is also important – as emblems of a house full of memories, and of the experiences of the women in the story. The light coming in from the windows is multivalent too. It has the quality both of a benediction and of the invasive, inescapable cold light of day, and death. The final sequence – in which Anna reads from Agnes’ diary and Bergman visualises, in the grounds of the house, her written account of a happy day with her sisters (with all three now dressed in white) – seems to reconcile the two aspects of the light, to transmute it into something milder and resigned.
6 January 2011