Cries and Whispers ultimately stands among Ingmar
Bergman’s most unsettling, pitiless films, such that a character’s closing memory
of a day of happiness with those she loved most seems drenched in cruel
self-delusion, a scavenging of scraps from a largely desolate life. The film is
built around three sisters: the unmarried, dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson,
whose screams of pain penetrate to the bone), cared for in her final days by
Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), and by a maid, Anna (Kari
Sylwan), the person on whom Agnes is most functionally dependent, sometimes cradling
the dying woman against her naked breast. The scheme includes glimpses of the
past, and scenes of Karin and Maria’s married lives, both involving incidents of
desperate self-harm: Karin’s husband is shown to be particularly insufferable
in his self-righteous formality, embodying a hypocritical society mired in rigid
expectations and judgments (a scene where Karin’s maid helps her undress illustrates
clothing as a medium of this layered oppressiveness). The stunning blood-red décor
that dominates the film’s first section seems to express all that’s repressed
and unsaid, while also inviting the violence and breakdown to which the film
often feels on the verge of succumbing. But the film is as bleak in its small
cruelties: Karin and Maria seem for a while to repair their long-fractured
relationship, talking deep into the night, expecting to move forward on a
better basis, but in the last exchange between them we see old
micro-aggressions creeping back, albeit now in somewhat different form. In this
regard, the film’s close-ups of clock hands heavily moving, and an early scene
in which Agnes gets up from her sickbed to adjust the time, apparently just to
produce a single chime, speak to a milieu divorced from its most basic
capacities for measurement and control, for evaluation and action.
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