Cries and Whispers
Title: Cries and Whispers
Release Date: 1972
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman is a director I’ve been desperately trying to grasp for quite awhile now. Maybe it’s his style, maybe it’s the momentum, maybe it’s the structure and general composition of the movies that I just don’t quite get. On paper, Ingmar Bergman is a director I should love. He’s subtle enough yet blatant enough with his message and his films usually deal with emotions and moments that I’m a fan of in other directors. Fanny and Alexander was excellent, both a lush, beautiful exploration of life’s crossroads and the problems and issues that arise out of certain thematic predicaments. Through A Glass Darkly was, while not as awe-inspiring as Fanny and Alexander, a tragic and passionate film that wove the abstruse mysteries of life and false beliefs into a foaming collage of happiness and order (however depressing the film may actually be). I came into Cries and Whispers expecting great things, yet was left with a feeling of discontent.
Let’s start with what I enjoyed about the film, as little as that was. The colors Bergman used were, right off the bat, heavy handed and wonderfully done. When I think of red, I think of passion, of friction, of hatred and burning emotion. All of these are present within the entire span of the film, whether it was within the characters themselves or showcased beyond the tangible world of actors and sets. Maybe it was just something I noticed, but red was the dominant color on the interior of almost everything, perhaps subtly displaying how candid each individual was behind their facade. Another aspect of the film I enjoyed was the unsettling and unspoken tragedy that has somehow ripped through the family. It seems as though there is some sort of sporadic and spontaneous event that lingered above each character, creating a sense of nervousness and trembling throughout the entire film.
And that’s where it ends. Everything else about the film either pissed me off or evoked an eye-roll or two. Let’s start with Bergman’s perhaps unintentional incapability to form any sort of storyline with the consistency and momentum required to progress the characters beyond card board cut outs. Maria was the most interesting character out of the bunch of hags, even if she was a self-indulgent whore who pranced about gaily as her husband bleeds to death and her flirtatious advances on the doctor are severally hindered. The housekeeper was a rigid and fanatical lesbian cooped up inside her weak mind, flopping her boobs out whenever her lady moaned deep enough. The ambiguity underlying these scenes are not strokes of genius, nor are they artistic or beautiful in anyway. They are bombastic portrayals of several lives entwined by a tragic situation and the meager feelings provoked by it. The conversations are laughable and blatantly pompous articulations of Bergman’s own tragic pathos. There was no depth, no true sentiment behind anything any of the characters actually stated. Let’s not forget the uninspired self-mutilation scene and random, incoherent character flashes, complete with “cries and whispers”.
The cinematography of the film was also horrendously and laughably bad. Illogical, inert zooms on the characters broke the atmosphere one too many times. I’d be following a character, slowly and finally being immersed into the film, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the camera zooms up into one of the hags face like she’s got something super important to say. Usually they’d just be passing around a corner or daydreaming, nothing of interest to say and no emotion to display. The camera felt amateurish, like some low-budget horror soap opera on CBS. It captured the moments of emotion on the decline, lofted over couches and chairs, feebly marching around the corners touting itself as it blazed into the emotional battlefield Bergman had created. Or the crapfest it ended up being.
As hard as I want to enjoy Bergman, it seems his films just aren’t for me. It’s not that I ‘don’t get it’, nor is it that I don’t possess the emotional and intellectual capacity to fully understand his films. I do. What I don’t enjoy is how he bludgeons the viewer relentlessly with his uncanny ability to segment emotion, however confusing that may sound. His dissimulation of love and mismanagement of the frail emotions he’s lauded for absolutely bewilders me, considering how many films he has under his belt. The stories heart dwells and depends on the characters and the interaction they’re seemingly hindered by. Bergman, however, fumbled this ball miserably. Cries and Whispers is nothing more than an erogenous metaphor for the menstrual cycle, played out in a wooden house with red walls and lofty lesbians. Let’s pretend your emotional behemoth wasn’t simply Tampax propaganda Bergman, I’m willing to give you another shot.
40%
