452
JONATHAN BAUMBACH
Whispers
seems to me a case in point. This striking and often beauti·
ful film is thinly conceived (no felt past is imagined for the four
central women ) , enervated, visually static, full of Bergman's by now
predictable and facile metaphysical stances and, not of least concern,
painful to witness. A woman is dying in a morbidly elegant turn-of–
the-century manor house; three others (two awful sisters and an earth–
mother housekeeper) await her death. Bergman's newest is not so
much a meditation on death, as some reviewers have reported, but–
its obsessive concerns unrealized - about diverse states of soul, about
grace through suffering.
After seeing
Cries and Whispers,
I read the short story-like screen–
play of it that appeared last October in
T he New Yorker.
Although
exquisitely performed,
Cries and Whispers
is less satisfying as cinema
than its scenario is as story. No filmmaker reads better on the page
than Bergman and
Cries and Whispers
is particularly attractive as a
written narrative. It is as
if
the movie version, faithful to the letter,
violates by its very literalness the impulse and mystery of the author's
conception.
Everything in
Cries and Whispers
is self-referring. It is Bergman's
fantasy we witness, not his characters', though the film, which
is
realistically acted, pretends otherwise. On the page, we know that
it's Bergman's obsession - he is telling the story in his own voice–
but on screen, the author's unacknowledged presence intrudes ir–
relevantly on the action. The film's style is not a substitute for the
narrative voice of the story. For the viewer it is, if one can imagine
it, as
if
something that doesn't belong to the film is missing at the
center. The more
Cries and Whispers
asks us to believe in what we
see, the more false the surface of the film seems.
Each of the four main characters revisits the past
in
memory.
The sisters, except for the saintly Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who
is
dying in anguish of cancer of the womb, have been corrupted, so
the flashbacks reveal, by living corrupt lives-a piece of tautological
psychology, though justified perhaps by the logic of a dream. The
youngest sister, Maria (Liv Ullmann) is a coquette, vain and shallow,
who has had a loveless affair with the family doctor attending her
dying sister. Her two scenes with the doctor, one present, one fantasy
or memory, essentially duplicate one another in what they convey,
except that the reminiscence ends with a piece of melodramatic viol.
