Cries and Whispers
This DVD had been sitting around the house for a couple of weeks or so before we finally watched it tonight. I had been putting it off, waiting for the right time, because I expected it to be a somewhat intense, maybe painful, experience and I wanted a little time before and after so that I could see it and reflect on it with a clear mind. I knew it was not something to be viewed for entertainment on a Saturday night or relaxation after a day’s work.
If Bergman’s name had not been enough to make me treat Cries and Whispers with a bit of respect and caution, my memory of it would have. I had seen it when it came out in the early ‘70s and been deeply moved, far more so than I had expected to be. I remember being more or less unable to speak for some minutes after the end. My reaction tonight, though strong, was not so strong as all that; I’m not sure entirely why. It may be that the vision with which the final scene left me both then and now is something with which I’m more familiar than I was at 24 or so; I certainly stood in more need of it then than now. It’s a glowing vision of immense joy and gratitude for the sweetly perfect moments of life, and an assertion (or at least a suggestion) that it is these, and not the long hours or years of struggle and pain, that matter most, and are in fact eternal. It makes me think of the lines that close “Burnt Norton,” the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after
Some consider this Bergman’s finest work. Maybe so, although I don’t think it’s reasonable to try to pick a single finest. Certainly it’s among his best. It concerns three sisters, one of whom is dying painfully—cancer, I assume, although that’s never stated—and the servant girl who does most of the work and most of the caring. The two other sisters are both very much wrapped up in themselves and closed to others, each in a different but equally effective way.
I suppose Bergman, the atheist son of a Lutheran minister, just couldn’t help weaving Christian themes and imagery into his work, perhaps unintentionally. At any rate they are prominent here. The dying sister is named Agnes, which is derived from a Greek word meaning “sacred” or “pure” and also has an obvious resemblance to agnus, as in Lamb of God. Her suffering and death provide an opportunity for her sisters’ redemption. The faithful and loving servant is named Anna, from the Hebrew Hannah, “favor” or “grace.” There is an obvious evocation of Michelangelo’s Pieta in one scene, far too close a resemblance to be accidental.
If these remarks seem a little scattered, it’s because they are; the film is too rich and complex for me to do it justice quickly or briefly, and more thoughts and emotions are coming than I have time to write down. And for the sake of those who haven’t seen it, I don’t want to be too specific about the plot. Nor would I want to reduce it to a statement. But I can say that it left me with a very clear sense of how it is possible for a person to choose hell over heaven, and that we are making that choice at every moment of our lives when we make the choice between loving and not loving.
Sartre’s famous play No Exit is said (I’ve never read it) to make the point that hell is other people. This suggests to me that Sartre was already entering hell, because hell is the absence of love. Or rather the refusal to love, because I mean the absence of love given, not love received. To love and not be loved is immensely painful, but it isn’t hell. If one were loved by no creature in the universe, if one were unloved even by God himself, but were still able to love, one would not yet be in hell.
I should also mention that in simple visual terms Cries and Whispers is one of the most beautiful films you’ll ever see. (And warn you that there is one pretty horrifying scene.)
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