Cries and Whispers
It came out around the same time as “Scenes from a Marriage” but to me, it feels like it’s an entirely, entirely different from. I was originally drawn to it because the film looked so amazingly beautiful to me; in retrospect, I still think it is very, very beautiful. The saturated colors, the red of the tapestry, it looks stunning.
But I was not too fond of the story; I found it self-indulgent, the characters unlikable and, to some degree, one-dimensional without a good reason and whatever happened left me quite distant. Certainly I see the Chekhov and the Strindberg in it, and I like how the film focuses solely on the characters without all that history crap, but all this cannot make up for my impression that the film feels banal, very unlike Chekhov’s plays.
If “Tystnaden” was the last successful Bergman film before “Cries and Whispers”, then what is “Persona”? That is his real masterpiece, both visually and in terms of characterization of the two women. This one feels so bland in comparison to that, even the self-mutilation scene left me fairly unimpressed. It’s also unfortunate that Liv Ullmann happened to have gotten the role of the flirtatious hypocrite.
Yesterday night, I dreamed of getting a job to kill some false priest in front of his followers, and the rest of the dream was the ensuing running away from the police, during which I was saved by friends dressed up as policemen in a police car. At the moment, that seems much more interesting to me than this film where I cannot help but wonder if there is something I am missing.