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Rating: Red is the color of the soul.
For the viewer to penetrate its most intimate essence, they need only heed the simple suggestions that, throughout the viewing, will derive solely from the jolts of their soul. Giovanni Grazzini, in his “The Seventies in a Hundred Films,” writes: "To feel “Cries and Whispers” all you need are clear eyes and a trembling heart.” Assisted by her two sisters Karin and Maria and a housekeeper Anna, Agnes is suffering from cancer, and she will die from it, in a villa on the outskirts of Stockholm. Woven, indeed embroidered, with skill, patience, and visual rigor, respecting a symmetrical, almost mathematical scheme: four female interpreters versus four male interpreters; among the four women, two strong (the sick woman and the maid) against two weak (Agnes’s sisters). Bergman alternates with skillful editing, brief but significant flashbacks. As when, for example, in one of the initial scenes, a memory of Agnes is painted on the screen, images referring to her childhood and her mother: "I always think about mom almost every day, even though she's been dead for years." The film closes with the evocative images of the three sisters dressed completely in white walking on a green lawn, laughing and conversing with each other. A memorable reflection on physical and psychic pain, on fatal illness, on fear, on human compassion understood in the classical sense of “Pietas”, on the ambiguous capacity of women to suffer. The four actress-women are accompanied by four actor-men, modest, with secondary roles, if not downright negative: At the center of this film is also the figure of God. God hovers over the entire film, throughout the film. In a kind of pantheism (God is in everything: everything is God) not only verbally but also realistically. But, despite God’s looming presence, the real protagonists of the film, this time, but as always, for that matter, are human beings. In the two different gender genres: female and male. The women appear strong, determined, valiant, rocky, in sharp contrast, and with a strong negative connotation with their qualities, the flaws of the men stand out, almost all of whom are cowards, reticent, exploiters, materialistic. This particular aspect, this Manichean distinction between good and bad, has led some critics to cry out about the Master’s blatant and unjustified misanthropy. The protagonists of the film are also human bodies, and especially the flesh and muscles and nerves and bones of which they are made. Flesh as the corruption of the body, through the progression of fatal illness; or body and flesh understood as human warmth that the human body radiates, especially through the profound, material physical relationship that is established between the maid Anna and the sick Agnes. A relationship sealed by the Michelangelo-like embrace that Bergman constructs in one of the most evocative and formally successful scenes of the entire film. Sounds and music play a vital, foundational role in “Cries and Whispers.” The sound is that almost imperceptible of bodies, the rustling of clothes and linens; the chimes of the wall clocks or the uninterrupted and regular swinging of the pendulums marking the passage of time; or even the rattles, cries, sounds of suffering, sobs, whispers, and cries that punctuate some key scenes.
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