A Mirror Floating in Water

I have just re-watched Persona for the third time and still feel that I'm not worthy enough to review such a great and mysterious film. If anything it is a masterpiece of cryptic modernism in film. One of the all time greats, and Bergman's finest.

Speaking of Bergman, here's a review that I attempted to write when I first saw Cries and Whispers. It was just too hard for me to go on, because even words do injustice to the film and trivialize it.

However, I did finish it, but it is terribly unorganized and not one of my best at all:

Clocks tick away in a silent house in early morning. A women awakes in great pain. We can almost hear the sounds of her insides. She takes a glass of water and it harshly goes down.


Cries and Whispers - Taking place at the turn-of-the-century this film inhibits the most deepest, darkest and most intense array of human emotion between three sisters. Each one seems to have done little with their life, and have begun to loathe themselves for it. One of them is in the final stages of cancer, leading to the most painful death scene I have ever seen. We can hear sounds from her stomach, her breathing becomes intensely acute and her voice sounds animalistic and humanly unrecognizable. Ingmar Bergman presents death, in contrast to his most famous masterpiece The Seventh Seal, not in an abstract or theatrical way, but in a cruelly physical and naturalistic way. He presents it as the death of the body. The sister's inevidible death forces us to turn to the other two sisters, as well as the servant as they prepare the funeral.

Flashbacks are shown of the other two sister's life. The two flashbacks further present the extremes of human emotion and how these two women became who they are today. This film isn't a decent into despair, in so much as it is an atmosphere of despair, that is, these induviduals are already wounded in one way or another.

But in a film so filled with narcissism, cruelty and coldness from its characters, there is the greatest love to be found in the servant Ana, who has been treated as a sister and is the one who comes to the dying sister's side when she is screaming in pain and lays her next to her breast like a mother calming her sick child. Bergman films this like a Reinissance painter, so spiritually, so painfully. There is one particular shot in here of Ana holding the dying sister that is so powerful and so heartbreaking, that it is without a doubt one the best in all of cinema.

The two sisters don't know how to express emotion, and in a scene of the most deepest and stunning emotional intensity that the cinema has ever seen (you will know it when you see it, for it is beyond words) their most deepest personal insecurities and insticts all come out.

In the end, what Bergman presents in the final heartbreakingly beautiful scene, is that life is dark, short, tortuous, deceptive, indifferent and infinitley cruel. But there are those moments, just those little moments of joy, that make it all worth it. To quote Dostoyevsky; "My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for one man's life?"