“Cries and Whispers” or “Viskingar och Rop” (1972) was Ingmar Bergman’s 43rd film. He wrote the script, directed and produced it. The script evolved out of his personal experiences. His father had died. His ex-wife had died in a car crash. His relationship with Liv Ullmann was in tatters. Yet she stars in this film, and their daughter is in it too.
The opening sequences are a classic in world cinema: the dawn, the park outside the house, the close-ups of clocks ticking. One clock stops. Agnes (Ingrid Thulin), in bed, dying of cancer, awakes, goes to the mantle and re-starts the pendulum on the clock. She is granted one more day. She goes to a desk and writes in her diary, “It is early Monday morning and I’m in pain. My sisters and Anna are taking turns to watch over me”. She returns to bed.
Maria (Liv Ullmann) is asleep on a settee in the next room. Anna (Kari Sylwan) comes in with morning tea. The rooms have extraordinary colours, with the rugs, walls, upholstery in red, the furniture in dark hues, and the apparel white. Colour dominates this extraordinary film. The faces of the three sisters appear and fade within various shades of red. Sven Nykvist won an Oscar for his cinematography in “Cries and Whispers” in 1973.
Bergman uses the flashbacks in this film to relate the emotional history of the four women, not to tell a story. They are intense and revealing and the viewer must pay attention to them. Otherwise the behaviour of Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and her sisters will not be comprehended. Even the pious servant girl, who has lost a daughter due to illness, her purity above the shallowness of the three sisters is also revealed through brief revelations of the past. Both Maria and Karin are caught in loveless marriages (“all a tissue of lies”).
Agnes has never married, but creates through her watercolours. It is she of the three who must die. Can her death alter the sisters’ sense of distance, coldness? Their refusal to make contact? Large, round, earthy Anna is the opposite, and offers herself to comfort Agnes as if she was her lost child. The bourgeois stinginess of the surviving sisters is chilling. Don’t miss it. Bergman won “Best Film”, “Best director” and “Best writer” while Liv Ullmann won for “Best Actress” at the New York Critics awards in 1972.
It is in colour, in Swedish with English subtitles, 88 minutes [rated for 18 and up because of nudity and self-mutilation, both physical and psychological]. Siv Lundgren edited it. The music is by Bach and Chopin.
