224 - Cries and Whispers, 1972, Sweden. Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

224 - Cries and Whispers, 1972, Sweden.  Dir. Ingmar Bergman.

Whispers and Shouts.

So far every Bergman film we have seen has been filmed in Black and White.

Now we see one filmed in Black and White--and Red.

Crimson Red.

Crimson walls.  Crimson carpets.  Crimson curtains.  Crimson cushions.  Crimson upholstery. Crimson lace.  Crimson wine.  Crimson title cards.  Crimson dissolves.

This is the first Bergman color film we have seen.  He made one before, All These Women, in 1964, but Criterion does not offer it.

Sven Nykvist won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for this film.  Shockingly, it was the first time he was nominated.

He would win again a decade later for Fanny & Alexander (1982), which we will see.

This is Bergman's Three Sisters.

Three sisters that do not love one another--or two who do not and one who longs for it--and their maid.

The visual layout is essential.  The architecture of the country manor.  The rich formality of the high-ceilinged, open rooms.  The walls and the carpets and the drapes.  The furniture.  The beds.  The dressers.  The tables.  The chairs.  The piano.

Maybe it is a piano.  This is the kind of house where it may actually be a spinet.

Agnes is dying.

Agnes is played by Harriet Andersson, the girl who burst on the screen 19 years ago in Summer With Monika, who had romped bare-rumped on the rocks, who had turned slowly and stared at us, directly into the camera, for 29 long, cinema-history-making seconds.

She no longer looks like Monika.

Not only due to the age of the actress but also due to her internal and external work on the character. She is only 40 in real life, but the character looks old and tired and sick and sad.  The very act of awakening is an effort for her.  When she opens her lips for her morning yawn--indeed, her morning gasp at breath--they are off-centered and stuck together and peel apart from their covering film.

She is a committed actress.

She has now done half a dozen films with Bergman and is a member of this great company he has gathered.

Agnes lives here.  And the maid, Anna, played by Kari Sylwan, a perfectly cast non-company-member.  The other two sisters have come to stay with her in her final moments.

Agnes wears white.  All of them wear white some of the time.

Karin is the sister who wears black when she does not wear white.  She is cold and hard and frigid. She resists her husband to the point of cutting herself where he cannot get to her.  And smearing the blood on her face.  And taunting him with it.

Karin is played by Ingrid Thulin.  She has also done half a dozen films with Bergman.  We especially remember her as the agnostic Marta who loves and is rejected by the pastor in Winter Light (1963) and the cerebral sister Ester in The Silence (1963).

The third sister is Maria.  She wears red when she does not wear white.  Namely, a red negligee which she uses to seduce the good doctor in a flashback.  And she has long, thick, brilliantly ginger red hair.

Maria is played by Liv Ullmann, Bergman's new edition to the company and maybe the one with whom he is most associated.  She joined us yesterday in Persona (1966) and is now already on her fifth film with Bergman.  Criterion currently skips Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1968), and The Passion of Anna (1969).  Ullmann also plays her own mother in the flashbacks.

Where Karin is cold, Maria is warm.  Where Karin rejects her husband, Maria embraces other men, the one we know being the doctor, David, played by Erland Josephson.  He has not only acted in half a dozen Bergman films by now, but he has also cowritten with Bergman.  He was a successful screenwriter as well as actor.

The film feels somewhat epic in its presentation, even though it is only 90 minutes long, because of its grand setting, its steady pacing, its fluid movement back and forth across time, the impression it gives that we are dealing with generations.  Yet it is actually quite small:  One location.  One action (the death of Agnes, not counting the memories).  One small group of people.  Three sisters and a maid.  No grandparents or parents other than one mother in a flashback.  No children.  No families, other than two husbands in flashbacks.

And in the end, the love for which Agnes longs remains rejected by her sisters.  Anna the maid is a woman of faith and love.  She reveres God in the loss of her daughter and nurses Agnes like a mother, though she may be younger.  (There is a famous image compared to the Pieta.)  Agnes, too, has faith, as witnessed by the minister's eulogy.  In fact, she has so much that she comes back to the sisters after her death in order to appeal to them again.

But, no.

Karin and Maria will send Anna on her way, with no more than a small token for her years of service.

As they themselves go their separate ways, Maria rejecting Karin one more time, not remembering that she had reached out to her the day before.

But Anna will take Agnes's diary with her.  And read the entry about the day years ago when they were all together.

Outside.

In their white dresses.  In the green grass.  Under the blue sky.

And they sat in the swing.  And swung.  And Agnes was happy.  And grateful.  For her life.  And said so.

Come what may, this is happiness.  I cannot wish for anything better.  Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection.  And I feel profoundly grateful for my life . . . which gives me so much.

                                                                                                                                   FADE TO RED.