Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • Cries and Whispers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Love and Mercy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bill Pohlad (2014)

    The creative genius of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, was anxious from an early stage of the group’s career to work in a recording studio rather than perform to audiences.   The director of Love and Mercy, Bill Pohlad, and the screenwriter, Oren Moverman, respect Wilson’s preferences.  They quickly summarise the Beach Boys’ initial success – reconstructions of performances in live concert and on television, enough to give us our bearings – before concentrating on the protagonist’s private and unusually cloistered professional lives in the years that followed.   The narrative switches between the mid- and late-1960s and twenty years later, by which time Wilson – after a long period of halting creative activity, drugs, alcohol and food addictions, and nervous breakdowns – was under the influence of a psychotherapist called Eugene Landy.  This relationship began when Wilson’s first wife, Marilyn, enlisted Landy’s help.  By the 1980s, according to Love and Mercy, he was not only dictating strategies for improving and maintaining his patient’s mental health; Landy was also Wilson’s de facto legal adviser and commercial manager.  Oren Moverman’s screenplay is a reworking of a script by Michael Alan Lerner called ‘Heroes and Villains’.  That Beach Boys’ song may have been rejected as the title for the eventual film, in favour of one of Wilson’s later compositions, but the moral distinction of the main characters reflected in the title of Lerner’s script certainly holds good in Love and Mercy.

    Pohlad’s and Moverman’s juxtaposition of the youth and middle age of their hero’s life isn’t a novel idea.  What is surprising is that the twenty-something and forty-something versions of Wilson are played by two different actors, Paul Dano and John Cusack respectively.  (Once the central figure in a biopic has reached adulthood, you expect her or him to remain in the same body for the duration – however many decades the life lasts, however much aging make-up is required.)   Perhaps this isn’t so unexpected in view of Oren Moverman’s track record:  he co-wrote the screenplay for Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007).  That film, however (although I don’t think much of it), has a thematic rationale for its multiple incarnations of Bob Dylan that hardly applies to Love and Mercy.  Paul Dano, chubbier than he usually is, somewhat resembles the young Brian Wilson; John Cusack doesn’t look like the older Wilson, or like Dano.  It’s clear from the start, even in the brief clips of the Beach Boys on stage, that Paul Dano has got Brian Wilson:  he’s alert and expressive in ways I’ve not seen from this actor before.  Dano is so engaging that at first you miss him whenever John Cusack is on screen instead but Cusack’s interpretation of Wilson gradually wins you over.  Once his psychological problems start to take hold in the 1960s part of the story and you fully understand his circumstances in the 1980s, it makes a kind of sense that Brian Wilson is literally a different man.  The question of whether there’s a spiritual continuity between two actors playing one person in the same film is always a particularly subjective judgment.  I’m not sure I did sense this kind of link between Dano and Cusack but that didn’t seem to matter – the Dano Wilson and the Cusack Wilson feel like complementary characterisations.  For example:  Dano animates Wilson’s creativity, a quality that’s inevitably submerged in the man Cusack is playing; Dano has relatively little opportunity to dramatise Wilson’s emotional neediness – an opportunity that Cusack is given and which he takes.

    There’s a third strong performance on the heroic side of the cast list – from Elizabeth Banks, as Melinda Ledbetter, the car salesperson who eventually became Brian Wilson’s second wife.  (They first meet when Brian buys a Cadillac from the showroom where Melissa works.)   The script presents Melinda as entirely admirable – loyal, loving, courageous in her resistance to Eugene Landy.  Elizabeth Banks does well to suggest what it costs Melinda to achieve this.  Banks is especially good at the nuances of smiling:  Melinda’s sunny expression is a mask and a shield as often as it’s an expression of pleasure or joy.   As the chief villain Landy, Paul Giamatti does a fine job.  Landy’s tyrannical domination of Wilson is manifested in increasingly extreme and outrageous ways:  the nasty wit that Giamatti brings to the role is always there – he also gives Landy a streak of growing desperation that strengthens the character.  Bill Camp is less successful as Wilson’s father Murry, the Beach Boys’ manager until they dismissed him in 1964.   In his important first scene – Brian, anxious to impress his father in spite of the rift between them, plays the evolving ‘God Only Knows’ on the piano and sings the lyric to Murry – I felt Camp needed to be either more remote or more deliberately hurtful in his response.  He doesn’t get a level of hostility that gives Paul Dano what he needs to react to.   It’s obviously not Camp’s fault that each of Murry’s subsequent appearances in the story is rather crudely conceived.  The writing of the smallish roles of the other Beach Boys – neither heroes nor villains – isn’t inspired either, although Jason Abel is amusing when Mike Love complains, in humourless exasperation, that on Pet Sounds ‘even the happy songs sound sad’.

    The studio sequences are absorbing and Bill Pohlad’s description of the creation of ‘Good Vibrations’ made me like it more than I ever have before.  Pohlad and Oren Moverman have an understanding of pop biopic conventions and audience expectations – by conforming to and departing from these, they make Love and Mercy distinctive.  We never hear a song in its entirety:  this is tantalising and sometimes frustrating but it chimes with the emotionally unsettled quality of the story being told.  The closing stages of the film are more conventional.  There’s a degree of anti-climax in that but it’s a relief too that the good end happily and the bad unhappily – in fact.  Because Brian Wilson is having such a traumatic time throughout, this is one occasion when you’re pleased to see closing images of the protagonist in real life and legends telling you he’s enjoyed a sustained renaissance as a singer-songwriter and an enduring marriage to the woman from whom, more than thirty years ago, he bought a Cadillac.

    15 July and 9 September 2015

     

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