Touches You

Simply Perfect

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

This would have been a good movie for "Mystery Science Theater 3000" to take up. After all, if this movie is going to have characters stand around not saying very much, and then have them sit around not saying very much, and then have one of them lie in bed dying of cancer and not saying very much, and then have two sisters talk to each other without giving the audience the benefit of hearing what they are saying, the "MST3K" team might just as well have supplied some witty dialogue.I suppose Ingmar Bergman, while making this movie, said to himself, "Boy, all my movies are profound, but I'm really being profound in this one," and I suppose those people who make up the art house crowd shared in that opinion. I mean, what can be more profound than making a depressing movie about the slow, agonizing death of a cancer victim; a maid who comforts that cancer victim by giving her the benefit of a couple of naked breasts; a woman who cuckolds her husband until he impales himself, who then actually asks her to help him (how exactly?); two sisters teasing us with a little lesbian incest; one of those sisters telling her maid to quit looking at her just before she gets completely naked while the maid looks at her; and that same sister picking up a piece of broken glass and shoving it up her vagina so that she can smear the blood all over her face in front of her husband?As for this last, I thought that after she forced the broken glass up her vagina she was going to invite her husband to have sex with her. Normally, such a twisted thought would never cross my mind, but it seemed like a reasonable expectation at the time. If Bergman had put that in the movie, it really would have been profound.

I lived in Manhattan when "Cries and Whispers" was released in theaters and remember how the New York intelligentsia were all over this film. I guess it had some shock value at the time. Revisiting it forty years later, I find it boring, shallow and fatally lacking in humor. Filled with talk and solemn posturing that ultimately leads nowhere, the final flashback scene is scant reward for all the Sturm und Drang that preceded it. I even think Sven Nykvist's acclaimed cinematography looks dated. There are numerous clumsy zooms, the painterly tableaux look self-conscious and forced, and the fades to red were done eight years previously by Robert Burks for Alfred Hitchcock's "Marnie." Viewers would have to be as masochistic as Ingrid Thulin's character to enjoy this pretentious gabfest.

I felt that Ingmar Begman's Cries and Whispers was certainly different than I would expect of most films centered around the death of a family member. What surprises me about this film is how dysfunctional and repressed most of the family members are around each other. The sisters look back upon their failed marriages and attempts at proving themselves to each other, all the while the dying sister tells them to just try and reconcile, yet they are ultimately unable to do so. What was so intriguing to me about this film was the fact that it showed you that sometimes tragedy can't heal the wounds and rifts that form in relationships, and that denial can prove more powerful than understanding.

This film explores existentialism through the physical, emotional, and psychological torture of its characters. When Agnes' two sisters visit the plot thickens as her pain transcends physicality despite the comfort she receives from her maid as all women are forced to confront the shadows that bind them.As one character's pain affects and reflects the others' the director takes the audience on a downward spiral of resentment, hopelessness, and agony. The film's poetic cinematography with it's commendable use of the close-up only heightens the characters' suffering as their beauty contrasts with their exterior and interior reality. Watching this film feels like staring at a well composed painting in motion where each gesture and each moment, whether it be a moment of constant screaming in complete and absolute pain or a moment of silence, sets the viewer in an inevitable state of contemplation.