While filming THE TOUCH, Ingmar Bergman had a recurring idea: four women dressed in white in a large red room; he pursued it through his imagination and made it real in the unrelenting and powerful VISKNINGAR OCH ROP or CRIES AND WHISPERS.
Despite financing problems it won a Cannes jury prize and it's worldwide success culminated in the rare occurance of a foreign language film being nominated for five main Academy Awards, winning for Sven Nykvist's stunning cinematography.
In a large, nearly-empty family mansion, ornate clocks tick away Agnes' life as she slowly dies from cancer, watched over by her attentive maid Anna who mourns the death of her own daughter.
The only other occupants are Agnes' married sisters Katrin and Maria who have come to watch and wait...
The oppresive atmosphere conjours up unhappy memories in each sister; Agnes dies and the sisters let their polite masks drop...
Shelf or charity shop? Haunting the shelf. Even with Bergman's body of work the 50 year-old CRIES AND WHISPERS remains an unsettling, disturbing film with four extraordinary performances by the actresses he always envisioned playing the roles - although he actually originally wanted Mia Farrow as Anna the maid! Kari Sylwan appeared in her first Bergman film playing Anna, the only one who shows any real love for Agnes. His three other actresses each made 10 films with Bergman: Harriet Andersson is astonishing as the dying Agnes (in her 8th Bergman role), Ingrid Thulin (in her 9th Bergman role) is icily disdainful as the emotionally dead Katrin - the scene where she cuts her vagina with a broken wine glass has lost none of it's horrific intensity - but the most complex role goes to the magnificent Liv Ullmann who delivers wonderfully. In her 5th Bergman performance, Ullmann as Maria, whose beauty and sensuality covers an immature and petulant interior, is the one you always watch; in flashback she also plays the sister's mother, beautiful but remote. Only at the end does Bergman allow a flash of happiness, all the more touching coming after all we have witnessed.
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