Four Women

By JAY COCKS

CRIES AND WHISPERS

Directed by INGMAR BERGMAN

Screenplay by INGMAR BERGMAN

Here Bergman seems to be working again within that still, grave place from which sprang such transitional works as Brink of Life or Hour of the Wolf. This is not, like Persona, one of his greatest, most enlarging films, although it does bear some superficial stylistic resemblances to that early work. Cries and Whispers is somewhat more formal, measured, perceptibly detached, a film of physical and emotional violence carried into forbidden areas of the spirit.

As it is in all of Bergman's films, the story--the premise--is meticulously simple. Two women, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), care for their sister Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is dying of some awful unspecified illness. As they attend her during her last days, they remember and relive old memories of childhood, of deep bitterness and irresolvable rivalries. They touch each other, torment each other. The only source of strength in this stately, silent household is the stolid maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), whose own daughter has died and who lavishes all her love and her tenderness on Agnes.

Cries and Whispers concerns--again very simply--the desperate imperative of achieving grace. Maria reaches out toward Karin, Anna toward Agnes, and Agnes, through the intensity of her suffering, toward peace and toward God. Death, at least as dreamed by Anna, affords no real release for Agnes. "I can't sleep, I can't leave," she murmurs from her bed, quite unmoving but for a tear that runs down her cheek from under her closed eye. She tries to draw her sisters to her, but it is only Anna who responds, only Anna in her dream who offers comfort as Agnes dwells in limbo.

Turmoil and Panic. After the dream is ended, after the funeral and the departure of the two sisters, who have again become locked into their emotional stalemate, Anna opens the leatherbound diary in which Agnes has made entries during her illness. She reads Agnes' account of a day during the late summer when all four women sat together in a garden swing, "as we were in childhood. All my aches and pains were gone. Come what may, this is happiness. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection." Anna draws comfort from this passage, and "the whispers and cries," the murmured intimations of turmoil and panic that have been like a leitmotiv on the sound track, die away.

The trouble with this, the reason that we cannot fully accept it, is that Bergman's anguish is so much more intense than this final fillip of grace. The despair is so much deeper than the redemption. There are but a few fleeting glimpses from Agnes' diary; perhaps there ought to have been more, to serve both as balance and counterpoint. There should certainly have been more about the men in the film, who are shadows and ciphers. The single most shattering scene in the film becomes, for this reason, unnecessarily oblique. Preparing herself for bed one evening, Karin takes a shard of glass and lacerates her genitals. Raising the frail white silk of her nightgown toward her waist, showing her husband the blood running down her thighs, she grins in triumph and with a hint of perverse satisfaction. Because we know so little of her husband, though, Karin's act is neither thoroughly motivated nor sufficiently provoked.

The film, set unspecifically near the turn of the century, recalls Bergman's National Theatre staging of Hedda Gabler. Here, as in that production, the dominant color motif is red of a dark, smothering, somehow vaguely menacing hue. "Don't ask me why it must be so because I don't know," Bergman writes in the Cries and Whispers screenplay. Perhaps it is because "ever since my childhood I have pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red." Both Hedda Gabler and this film share, too, a careful choreography of movement, with the actresses gliding in almost glacial grace across the frame. Yet as ever in Berg man, although the conception seems theatrical, the style is superbly cinematic. Bergman is a film maker of consummate craftsmanship. There are mo ments in Cries and Whispers that are among the most memorable he has ever filmed: an eager, unrestrained display of sudden mutual affection between Ka rin and Maria, a desperate fantasy of the sisters touching and talking to each other as the camera pans back and forth and no words are heard, only Bach's music; Agnes, dead, rising from her bed and blindly grasping and holding a hysterical Maria.

Part of Bergman's genius has always been his awesome skill with actors. No one is quite so successful in stripping them of all artifice and cutting in so close to their very being. Each of the four actresses in Cries and Whispers is perfect, and no one is permitted to be supreme. Bergman orchestrates them scrupulously, so that the film is the very definition of flawless ensemble playing. Kari Sylwan, the only one of the quar tet unfamiliar from previous Bergman films, gives Anna a strange, almost mys tical sense of strength. Liv Ullmann's Maria is that rare creation, a vacuous creature of substance. This seeming paradox is one excellent measure of Berg man's talent, and Miss Ullmann's.

As Ingrid Thulin plays her, Karin is a woman ravaged by rage and contempt. When she says, "I can't breathe any more for all this guilt; it's like living in hell," we can nearly see the flames licking up around her. Harriet Andersson has perhaps the most difficult role of all. To suffer, to be racked by pain and to die is the sort of technical challenge that is hard to do well because it has been done so often and so badly by other actors. Miss Andersson achieves dimensions of reality that are rarely even recognized, much less touched. Except, that is, in the work of Ingmar Bergman.

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