My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 7): Cries and Whispers

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Written and Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Starring Harriet Andersson and Liv Ullmann

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how some artists can divorce their personal lives from their art, while others entwine the two. For example, Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with victimized, beautiful, distant, cold women, and portrayed them endlessly in his films (Vertigo, The Birds). Ditto Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), perhaps the greatest-ever director of actors (as opposed to spectacle, scenery, or crowds). He was famous for his abusiveness and complete domination on the movie set, and in fact became so entwined with his female actors that he had extramarital affairs with three (Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ulmann, with whom he had a child). He was married five times and had nine children, none of whom he paid much attention to, being consumed with his 45 films and multitude of directed plays.   Bergman’s modus operandi was to use his films to reflect on and come to terms with his many personal demons, especially his love/hate relationships with women. His work was his psychotherapy. This places the viewer in the painful, exciting, voyeuristic role of watching another human's struggles and therapy up close, like peering into a sex therapy session. The prime example of this work was Cries and Whispers, one of the greatest films ever made, and maybe the one with the best acting ever. 

Cries and Whispers tells the story of several days in the lives three sisters, drawn together in the family home as one of them dies, horribly, of tuberculosis. In a later interview, Bergman describes being obsessed with a year-long vision of women dressed in white, acting in front of a blood-red curtain. In the film, this translates into red walls, red bedspreads, red ceilings, red curtains cascading to the floor. To me it feels not just like blood, but menstrual blood. The three women (two of whom were Bergman’s mistresses) dominate the film, while their husbands and lovers fill mostly ineffectual, pathetic, or contemptible character roles. Clearly these women mostly have love, hate, and passion for each other, not for anything in the outside world. Hence, this blood-red, claustrophobic prison confines and intensifies the action. The occasional forays out into the estate gardens feel like another universe. The whole film feels like we are looking at these women through a microscope, with not a single flinch or eye movement escaping the camera’s gaze. For example, watch the opening. Not a word is spoken, but the dying Agnes’face communicates a whole novel’s worth of emotion in a few seconds.   This is painfully exquisite acting by Andersson and direction by Bergman.

The film continues to explicate the sisters’ history, but not ever completely. The screen turns red at times, and we see flashbacks (or are they dreams or fantasies?) of past events, including a pathetic, unsuccessful attempt at suicide by a husband and a vision of a cold, distant mother. At midway in the film, Agnes dies, in a wrenching, choking fit that is perhaps the most brutally intimate thing I have seen on film. Andersson later said she did it by channeling the memory of her bedside experience of her own father’s death. I cannot think of a better acting performance than this one. The ensemble cast is superb stew of dysfunction. Except for the maid Anna, who nurtures the dying Agnes like Mary in the Pieta, none of the sisters can manage to offer any real comfort or love to their sister, even pulling away screaming when she tries to touch them. Death does not always bring out the best in families, and our own weaknesses often prevent us from reaching out to others. Bergman in therapy. 

I do not know of any film that establishes its own universe the way this one does. We are desperate to get out of this micro-vortex, but are instead hypnotized and compelled to stay in it to watch these three superb women love and tear each other’s eyes out. While not Bergman’s most popular international film, Cries and Whispers became his most famous, even playing in US drive-ins (!) for a time. It is a cinematic experience like no other, and a major work of art.