CRIES AND WHISPERS Movie Review

Viskingar Och Rop

At the turn of the century, a dying woman and her servant are visited by the woman's two sisters. Though we do learn a bit about all the sisters' lives—and their relationships with each other—through flashbacks, it is their increasingly revelatory conversations that gradually probe the depths of their fears, exploring ever more honestly the love, sexuality, hatred, and dread that have formed them, driven them together, and torn them apart. The amazing cast is headed by Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, and Harriet Andersson, and the movie's look—filmed by Sven Nykvist in a darkly claustrophobic, red-saturated color scheme—allows the country house itself to become a principal, emotionally charged character in the story. Though Cries and Whispers is clearly a masterwork, it seemed to me on first viewing that its many wrenching and painful moments would have limited its audience to the traditional art house crowd—those already familiar with Ingmar Bergman's themes and obsessions. Not so. Cries and Whispers received an ingenious and intelligent promotional push from distributor Roger Corman (yes, that Roger Corman, director of Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters), who vowed that it would be the first Bergman film to saturate the American marketplace and even play drive-ins. The campaign worked, and word-of-mouth did the rest. A bona fide hit in the U.S., receiving five Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director (though cinematographer Nykvist was the only winner), Cries and Whispers allowed Bergman to reach a vastly wider American audience than he ever had before, paving the way for his future breakthroughs, Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander.

NEXT STOP … Persona, The Passion of Anna, Mother and Son

1972 (R) 91m/C SW Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Kary Sylway, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen; D: Ingmar Bergman; W: Ingmar Bergman; C: Sven Nykvist. Academy Awards '73: Best Cinematography; National Board of Review Awards '73: Best Director (Bergman); New York Film Critics Awards '72: Best Actress (Ullmann), Best Director (Bergman), Best Film, Best Screenplay; National Society of Film Critics Awards '72: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay; Nominations: Academy Awards '73: Best Costume Design, Best Director (Bergman), Best Picture, Best Story & Screenplay. VHS, LV HMV, WAR, BTV