Cries & Whispers (The Criterion Collection)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anders Ek, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Kari Sylwan, Liv UllmannBrand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Swedish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 91 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-06-19
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Cries & Whispers (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: CONVALESENCE AND DEATH IN AN EMOTIONALLY DEAD FAMILY
Summary: 5 Stars
The film was originally seen as one of Bergman's masterpieces, and derseves its place on two or three levels. First, it is visually of such uncompromising photographic beauty, it seduces us with its composition, color and the wonderful lights and darks of its interior sets, modeled as most are, against the handsome forms and faces of these four attractive women. It looks, at times, like the final tableau in any Valentino fashion show; that is, red, studied, intimidating. Second, the movie tells more because it says less; and in that way is can be called one of the early Minimalist films. Indeed, the screenplay is as simple as this: Two sisters come with their husbands to the family estate they share, to visit with their unmarried and dying sister. It appears to be a Summertime visit, for the outdoors is lush and green and all the actors are lightly clothed. Both the sisters are unhappily married; the youngest and prettiest, unfaithfully, and with a pretty little daughter, to a man she does not love; and the elder siter, a dour and bitter woman, to a man with whom she shares no physical intimacy. With and for this man the eldest sister at least symbolically, mutilates her sexual organs in a profoundly disturbing scene that cannot adequately be described.
Meanwhile, the invalid sister is busy dying, drifting in and out of consciousness, dreaming of the past, reliving an unhappy girlhood she endured while isolated from her mother's love. The third level of realization is told in the portrait of the fourth woman in this drama, the all-purpose housekeeper/maid and possibly nursemaid to the invalid sister. Seldom referred to by name or spoken to directly, she is kept strictly in her role of servant to the estate, though her duties and her affections go far past this kind of servitude. Distinct from the siters, the maid is shown to be a peasant woman opulent of body and quiet spiritual as well as physical strength. She, of them all, is the only one of them capable of experiencing sincere emotional attachment and love for the dying and finally dead sister, whom she nurses until and beyond the very end. She, like Reality itself, accomodates herself to death in all its inconveniences, as she does to life, with all its little humiliations and slights. She is like the Earth itself, bearing all woes and triumphs on her splendid, broad bosom.
The film is what you make of it. If it is or was depressing, you brought that with you. Like death itself, it is what it is. And I suppose the director's choice of portraying a story that could as well have been set in any era, including this one, is that by showing it in the more formal Victorial age before the First World War, the disparities between appearance and reality are better dramatized before a screen of social status and the exploitation of the poor. It might as well be seen as a moral tale about what not to do with one's life -- in the face of eventual death; that is -- to live for emotional truth in the face of social presure to dissemble and to conform. Subjective choices that have no effect whatever on objective reality.
The thematic material is treated in a visually symphonic manner. Nevertheless, however one experiences the film, one cannot but be moved by the exceptional cinematography of Nyquist (for without his wizardry the artistic enterprise would collapse) and the ultra vivid stylishness of the sets and costumes, dramatized by the arbitrary restriction of the color palette. It might remind one of the French cinema hit of a few years ago, RED, one of a trypdich of films including WHITE and BLUE. The abstract quality of this film because of color treatment is that dramatic, and that dramatically utilized for effect, but never at the expense of the story.
Like Tschekov's THREE SISTERS, this is a story about women, and as such it provokes one to ask again, Freud's question. Which question it does not attempt to answer. For, either one knows the answer, or one does not.
Summary of Cries & Whispers (The Criterion Collection)
Legendary director Ingmar Bergman creates a testament to the strength of the soul-and a film of absolute power. Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Agnes, tortured by cancer, transcends the pettiness of her sisters' concerns to remember moments of being-moments that Bergman, with the help of Academy AwardŽ-winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, translates into pictures of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.Similar DVD Movies
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