Cory Massimino

Review: Cries and Whispers (1972)

September 23, 2020 by Cory

★★★★★

Cries and Whispers feels like Ingmar Bergman simultaneously showing off and using great restraint; both bragging and abiding. It’s unbelievable what he was able to create with one camera, two rooms, three colors, and four actresses. By using the utmost restraint in all these areas while also demonstrating the mastery of his craft, Bergman achieves a nearly impossible balancing act and thereby endows every second of his creation with significance and meaning.

Bergman’s settings and shots are meticulous, claustrophobic, often redundant, and drenched in both the color of red and the feeling of tension. The production design is striking; both gorgeous to look at and powerfully evocative. Bergman uses the period set pieces and costuming to express his character’s inner lives and their complex emotions. In this way, he paradoxically takes full advantage of the presence of color in film while limiting his color palette to a mere single color in addition to the black and white he always had access to.

Bergman beautifully conveys the insight that the human face is the most powerful image in all of cinema in all his work, but it’s particularly pronounced and effective here. His cinematography is somehow detached yet intimate, passive yet fluid. He immerses us into these women’s inner lives but still gives us the distance with which to look upon them from the outside or, better yet, from one of the other women’s perspectives.

The story blurs the lines between reality and dreams (or nightmares), something Bergman did 15 years earlier in “Wild Strawberries.” But here he embraces full-fledged surrealism by not clearly indicating the lines between reality and dream and using the latter to express characters’ inner most fears and desires. Those sequences are much more open to interpretation here and the sense of unreality feels more reminiscent of “Persona.” These women don’t lead particularly dramatic lives but under their polished 19th century exterior, their inner lives are simmering with anger, pain, and longing. And one of the ways Bergman conveys that is through their dreams and nightmares.

No matter what happens in a given scene of this movie, Bergman likes to transition by fading to bright red. These fades stylistically reinforce the bright red walls and dresses, coloring every event and every character with a vague sense of painful ephemerality regardless of their status as reality or dream. On some level, it doesn’t much matter whether what we’re watching is reality or dream because each is more like the other than we are willing to accept.

That’s why Bergman doesn’t care to indicate to us the difference. This film is about the inner lives of these four women and that encompasses *both* reality and dreams. Bergman’s goal is to convey that to us in whatever way he best can, with little concern for realism in any area besides the psychological.

As is common for Bergman, “Cries and Whispers” is oozing in theological symbolism, from gardens to apples to statues and more. What stood out to me most, though, was the way Bergman approaches structure and tone. For basically the whole runtime we are witness to three sisters and their servant suffering from the some of the very worst life has to offer: pain, sickness, death and the ensuing trauma, guilt, and loneliness.

But in the very final scene, we are treated to a flashback prompted by Anna reading the late Agnes’s diary. It’s a gorgeous day in an open, airy, green garden and all the women are wearing white and getting along. All the shots are spacious and free. And we hear Agnes, knowing full well what is in store for her, narrating her diary passage saying with utter contentment that “whatever may comes… this is happiness.”

Bergman likes to torture his audience with some of the most unbearable suffering and dread but every now and then he offers us a fleeting moment of comfort, gratitude, and fulfillment. And like Agnes, we must, whatever may come, seize those moments before they pass us by. Because they will.

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