You never quite know what you’re going to get with Bergman. Cries and Whispers is an astonishing film. Part Exorcist, part Piano Teacher. As rough and raw as Cassavetes with the added no-holds-barred of Haneke. Four women in a claustrophobic house. Scarcely an exterior shot. Relentless use of the close up, as the anguished faces of the four women flicker with pain, desire or fear. There is not much of a story, this is more of a character study. Agnes, in an astonishing performance by Harriet Andersson is dying. How often has the pain of illness been represented with this much honest cruelty? I can’t remember a film which has had the bad taste and/or courage to show pain with as much candour, a scream from the depths which actively makes you, the viewer, want to turn away. Her other two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullman), each one bearing the repressed pain of their marriages, each one adopting their own avoidance techniques to distance themselves from their unpleasant husbands. And finally, Anna, the maid, (Kari Sylwan) whose humanity trumps everyone else. A final sequence that is a straight out ghost story, with the bravura of Strindberg in an Ibsenesque world. Cries and Whispers is one of those films which is blazing a trail towards some other vision of humanity, femininity, cinema. Four extraordinary performances in a film which is, at times, almost unwatchable, which is the highest praise that can be bestowed.
Incidentally, this was in so many ways the most appropriate possible film to have seen on the day that QE2 died, to witness an unadulterated version of death and its consequences.
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