CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972) FILM ANALYSIS

 CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972)

Cries and Whispers is a 1972 Swedish period drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Its themes include faith, the female psyche, and the search for meaning in suffering, and academics have found biblical allusions. Unlike previous Bergman films, it uses saturated color, red in particular. 

The film, set in a mansion at the end of the 19th century, is about three sisters and a servant who struggle with the terminal cancer of one of the sisters. The servant is close to her, while the other two sisters confront their emotional distance from each other.

So as I mentioned, cries and whispers are mainly about the death of Agnes, a young woman who has cancer. As the film starts, we can see the disease is greedily eating away at her insides and causing her moments of tremendous suffering. We could see that at times, Agnes could barely breathe. She even wakes up from sleep crying in pain and begging for a cure. The process of dying is really traumatic and seeing Agnes in this situation is also traumatic. 

Bergman has repeatedly returned to the subject of death in his movies throughout his career, and like most of his films, Cries and Whispers' main story also focuses on the death of Agnes. This film also focuses on the exploration of the past and focuses on Anna, Karin, and Maria and it helps us in giving a deeper understanding of these three women, shows the events in their lives, and explains why they react as they do when facing an injured woman, who is dying. 

Here Anna is the only person who can comfort Agnes, providing her with warmth, but the character contrast is also very uncomfortable. Karin and Maria are very scary people, they keep their distance. Karin is a column of ice and Maria's self-centeredness weakens her ability to take care of her sister.  We know very little about Agnes's background as she wrote a few notes in the diary, but they provided little information on who Agnes was before she finally lay down in the hospital bed. She is obviously more naive than her sisters.

At the same time, Anna showed kindness, loyalty, and mercy. She prayed regularly, asking God to care for his dead daughter, and she was the only person in the family who showed genuine sympathy for Agnes. She held the dying woman in his arms but the sisters kept their distance. Here both the sisters were shocked and repelled by their sister's pain, but they did not want to hold her hand or comfort her. 

The story of this film travels between the past and present and these flashbacks showcase the motifs and stories of the sisters. In one of the flashback scenes, we can see one of the most disturbing scenes of the film where Karin, who was depressed, cuts her vagina with a piece of glass, in order to avoid having sex with her husband. To see it is to touch the extremes of human feeling. 

However, the most notable feature of Cries and Whispers is that its eye-catching color palette is almost entirely composed of red, black, and white. These colors have a clear metaphorical meaning to Bergman and are used to support the narrative throughout the film.

Red occupies almost all the scenes that take place in the mansion. As the quote at the beginning of this article suggests, it represents the inside of the soul and is likely to be used as an allegory of the inside of the womb.

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