Bergman Off-Traget

...Smiling, she reclines on the bed and, as he approaches, offers him her bleeding genitals...

...The film is first and foremost visual there in lie its glory and limitation...

...Bergman explains that the inside of the brain always seemed red to hint...

...These, impressive as they are perhaps precisely because they are so impressive usurp the space in which people could be people and a life could give the illusion of being lived, not merely highlighted...

...It is a frosty tete-a-tete, with quiet hatred radiating across the long table...

...She is dead...

...We lose it in love, in kinship, in deathwhere, ironically, it is lavished upon us one final time...

...The nightgown, during the agony, has pulled up, and there is something faintly obscene about these still handsome legs bared in death...

...The word produces whispers of recollection in Maria's ears, and we return with her to the time when Anna's little daughter came down with an illness that proved fatal...

...There is also the hysterical breakdown of Karin with its garbled yet still revealing speech fragments, reminiscent of the nurse in Persona...

...When David reads the map of aging in the lines of Maria's face in a mirror, he calls her, for some reason, Marie...

...We see, too, their finished work: Agnes wearing a knitted, babyish bonnet, her hands pressing a fat yellow flower to her breast...

...Serenely alone now, Anna takes out Agnes' diary and reads the entry for a day when Agnes felt supreme happiness...

...Equally marvelous is the framing of the shots...

...Karin freezes...

...Perhaps she permits herself an overbold look...

...the camera pans upward and there, as before, is Maria, weeping and useless as ever...

...Maria will switch to red, Karin to black or an ominous, shiny dark grey...

...We see the four women in white, as they were at the beginning of the film, strolling gaily in the park around the house...

...Joachim, Maria's husband, was away, and David attended the sick child...

...Maria nevertheless touches her sister's face affectionately, and Karin breaks down: "I don't want you to do that...

...Agnes, a woman in her late 30s, is dying of cancer in her sumptuous country mansion circa 1900...

...Now it is Karin's turn to hear whispers, and she recalls a dinner for two in this very house, when she and her much older diplomat husband were paying a brief visit...

...The covers are tucked under Agnes' chin, her hands folded on top...

...to be kind to me...

...Take the one in the flashback where Maria and David confront each other before making love...

...we are reminded of the ballerina in Summerplay (Illicit Interlude), whose name was Marie, and who sat gazing at her not so young face in her makeup mirror, while the ballet master foretold harsh truths to her...

...Now a taper is shown burning in extreme closeup, a hand approaches with another candle to be lighted...

...They raise the bed covers to reveal Agnes' legs...

...upon being read to aloud, she dozes off...

...Karin overturns a glass of red wine...

...The magic lantern session goes back to such a lantern in Bergman's own childhood, about which he has written...

...in diverse but related desperation, ask for our help...

...By sedulous stages, the ugliness of death has been glossed over...

...Appalled, he watches her smear the blood all over her mouth and face the areas he might kiss And, once again, her eyes and tongue display sexual ecstasy...

...They stand, dim red and black figures, slightly out of focus in the background right...

...In any case, the three dominant colors, in their various permutations, provide an unusually intense, almost drastic, background against which the pastel colors of flesh take on a more pathetically ephemeral character...

...Anna refuses with a vehement shake of the head...

...Later on in the night, Agnes' horrible wheezing summons all the women to her bedside...

...The color motif of the film is sounded: the black of death and anguish and grief...

...the embittered minister's reference to this "dirty earth under a cold, empty sky" comes from Bergman's Erasmus Prize speech, subsequently the preface to Persona...

...Agnes keeps a diary, permitting Bergman to show us scenes from the past, as recorded in its pages...

...The very house seems to echo it with unearthly murmurs...

...her face first registers pain, then something akin to orgasm...

...The husband goes off to bed expecting her to join him...

...By being overconcerned with mood, ambience, visual and histrionic minutiae, and shock effects...

...The people I am most fond of were with me," declares Agnes' voice...

...But these and other echoes add little to Whispers and Cries (the "whispers" of memory must, surely, precede the "cries" of agony...

...The ministrations of the others finally bring her around and she is touchingly thankful...

...A crucial trust seems to be broken here, but the incident is presented too cursorily to bear much emotional weight...

...Maria, a frivolous but charming coquette, have come for the deathwatch...

...The acting of Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin and Kari Sylwan is superlative both individually and as an ensemble...

...Agnes, to be sure, is always white...

...She remains seated for a while, playing with a shard...

...They all thank her coldly and leave...

...There is a brief bedside prayer for the deceased...

...Left alone, Karin mutilates her vagina with the shard...

...it breaks and stains the tablecloth with a semblance of blood...

...She asks Anna to summon her sisters, but both of them repudiate her: Karin angrily, Maria hysterically...

...Anna proudly declines even the keepsake of Agnes that was promised her by Karin...

...A tissue of lies...

...She sobs about not being able to breathe any more...

...Karin's husband expresses his unwillingness to give Anna anything: She is young and can easily find other employment...

...the white of purity and innocence, of the sacrificial offering...

...struggling look...

...But Joachim found out, and Maria discovered him fumbling with a dagger with which he had just tried, bloodily and bunglingly, to kill himself...

...Don't you hear...

...here, more gloomily, it is the vision of a dead spinster, the posthumous illusion of one to whom life was niggardly and death prodigal in cruelty...

...There, however, it was a living man embracing his past and becoming reconciled to his life...

...Only the red walls exude a heady fascination that both exhilarates and oppresses...

...Karin's tone implies that Agnes, in her saintly naivete, only imagined such grace to be possible...

...Anna wakes up or thinks she does, though she is really dreaming...

...she repeats out loud and, shard in hand, retires...

...The sick woman takes a turn for the worse and David, the doctor, is summoned...

...And this touch (it became eponymous in Bergman's last film) is only one of several recapitulatory motifs...

...The camera tilts up to catch, suddenly, Maria, standing at the foot of the bed and sobbing...

...We hear whispers once more, and something like a child's moan in the night...

...Only the screenplay is a bit of a miscalculation...

...Still later, the wheezing recommences...

...Thus we are introduced to the sisters' dead mother, a beautiful, distant, apparently unhappy person, whom Agnes came to understand only by and by...

...Karin asks Maria whether their new-found closeness might not continue, but Maria's thoughts are elsewhere and Karin wheels on her furiously...

...and closest to us, framing the lower edge of the image, is a huge, soft, white bed with fluffy pillows at one end, and a large, rolled-up, white eiderdown at the other...

...It is up to Anna again to put the dead woman to rest, which she does by cradling her against her naked bosom in a tableau, part Pieta, part mother nursing her child...

...Anna is allowed the use of the house a little while longer...

...Except in the few brief outdoor scenes, a good many colors are barely or never glimpsed in the film...

...There's Agnes weeping," Anna cries out, but the sisters neither hear her nor feel her touch...

...a yellow flower gives us rather a jolt...

...The dead woman speaks (cleverly off-camera): The atmosphere in the house makes her anxious, prevents her from being at peace...

...The old minister invokes her as a saint and asks her to intercede for us with God...

...The hands now join the erring leg to its mate, and pull the nightgown over both...

...There are the various forms of sexual fulfillment, to which is opposed the simple touch of fellow-human hands that we all seek or shunseek even when we shun it, and cannot keep even when we have it...

...Karin, who cannot now abide such a glance, angrily slaps her, but immediately asks forgiveness...

...only Maria presses some money into her hands and lightly brushes the servant's face in a farewell gesture...

...Actually, the film begins with the camera exploring the park on a misty, chilly autumn morning...

...Her elder sister, Karin...

...And these scarlet and crimson hues suggest the interiors of theaters as well, so that we can perhaps say that the film unfurls in a theatrical inner space inside the thinking, feeling, suffering organs of humankind...

...The right color always manages to predominate: Even the roses in Agnes' sickroom are white, and it is one such white rose that dissolves into the image of the wistfully recollected mother...

...horrified, she withdrew, uttering that fateful monosyllable, "No...

...Although we perceive distinctions and parallels, we are not given enough material for their comparative evaluation...

...The two candles separate and as the camera retreats, we see that holding them are two black-clad women, the layers-out...

...The only other person in the house is Anna, a quiet, almost stolid, earth-motherish servant...

...He is momentarily tempted, then leaves with the monosyllable, "No...

...It then goes into Agnes' sickroom, where the bed is made of black wood, the bed linen and Agnes' nightgown are dazzlingly white, and the blanket is of a deep red...

...The sisters settle on the swings, and Anna rocks them gently...

...Sven Nykvist's cinematography may well surpass all color seen so far, and the sets, costumes and direction are masterly...

...and has a fit...

...the difficulty of breathing that both the dying and living experience, along with the shared difficulty of speaking...

...he can offer nothing beyond the compassionate touch of his hands...

...Surely, the inside of the body, or, indeed, the heart, must seem even redder...

...Later, sitting at the same table where the world once appeared to her a tissue of lies, Karin accuses Maria of smiling callously (is she equating her sister with her husband...

...a tough, efficient, withdrawn woman, and her younger sister...

...The two women separate, strangers again, but with coolly dutiful promises of annual get-togethers...

...in the adjoining room, the dead Agnes lies still and unwheezing...

...She reads a passage from Agnes' diary in which the dead sister expresses her thanks for having received the best gift from life: solidarity, friendship, grace...

...and the red of passion, blood and the tortured heart...

...For instance: Agnes has just died, and disembodied hands, in closeup or medium shot, smooth out her matted hair...

...I wanted to cling to the moment...

...But the two finally fall into each other's arms and exchange caresses, kisses, hugs...

...With sovereign skill, the three main colors intermingle...

...Maria, though married and a mother, tries to renew the affair she had with David...

...Her eyes manage one more quarter-smile at Anna, then turn toward the window and stop...

...Racked with pain, she piteously beats her breast...

...Anna falls across the body but does not cry...

...Tm he film has themes rather than a plot...

...Bed and fire sex and passion Are much more real than those fuzzy lovers...

...She looks into the empty crib of her dead child, then walks through the dining room where the studs on the chairs glow eerily in the moonlight (a magnificent shot...

...Anna undresses her in an elaborate, rather servile ritual...

...How does Bergman manage to lose these people as entities despite the fact that the details of their existences are captured with his customary insight and evocative power...

...and Anna will once wear a pale blue plaid print...

...For example, when, in Anna's dream, Karin and Maria go in to see Agnes, their darkling figures glide alternatingly past moon-whitened window shades and walls which, even at night, are a solemnly glowing red...

...These uncompromising colors dominate the film, for the walls are mostly scarlet, the furniture and nocturnal shadows supply abundant darkness, and gowns are generally white...

...In the sitting-room next to Agnes' bedroom, Maria and Karin lean against the walls as in a trance...

...This strikes me as a poor shortcut, particularly since the device of bringing in music, often baroque, to avoid dialogue has been used by too many lesser directors...

...Maria and Karin cannot help their sick sister, but the mothering Anna climbs into bed with her and offers her large, bare breasts as soothing pillows to her surrogate child...

...It is Karin and Anna, but we see them only as hands...

...We are given the interacting existences of four very different women to whom extraordinarily painful things happen, and we are to identify ourselves equally with all four of them although the film does not tell us enough to make us feel fully even for one...

...he implored, lurching toward her and collapsing...

...To Maria's horror, Agnes echoes Joachim's plea: "Can't someone help me...

...The whole family returns from the funeral...

...This is not to imply that the color symbolism is in any way obtrusive: One's awareness of it remains subliminal...

...Agnes cries out in pain...

...Nothing but lies...

...Agnes cannot even speak: Ghastly sounds dribble out of her mouth...

...Some of these incidents are too strident, some too ordinary, some too vague...

...Maria sobs...

...The image of bright outdoor happiness at the end echoes the last shot of Wild Strawberries, where Professor Borg has a radiantly white vision of his parents, still young, in a pastoral setting...

...Help me...

...I feel a great gratitude to life which gives me so much...

...they trail about the film as forlornly as the white-garbed, wraithlike women...

...One is stretched out desperately straight, the other is bent at a jaunty angle, giving the corpse a tom...

...As the hands lift the pushed-down bed covers to draw them back, Maria is blotted out, as it were, reproachfully...

...Still more extraordinary is the editing, with image commenting upon successive image...

...Back in the present, Maria confronts Karin with the fact of their sad estrangement, but Karin rebuffs Maria and maintains her isolation...

...She goes in to her husband who gives her a contemptuous look...

...Because Bergman spends so much time on atmospheric details, he is obliged to bring his women to life with a single, striking incident each...

...to the left, closer to us, an avid fire leaps in the hearth...

...The soundtrack plays the Chopin mazurka that was previously associated with Agnes, particularly when she was remembering her mother...

...The nays we utter to those who...

...Bergman says in the screenplay that it all began with a vision of four women in white inside a very red room, and that he had to puzzle out painstakingly the meaning of this image...

...he permits himself words of such doubt and despair as no Swedish Lutheran clergyman, especially of that period, could pronounce in public...

...We do not hear their words: the soundtrack bursts out with a Bach saraband for unaccompanied cello...

...He was persuaded to stay overnight, enabling Maria (who had been his girl once) to share his bed again...

...She howls rather like Agnes in her agony...

...Anna enters Agnes' room and the camera zooms onto the dead woman's face revealing fresh tear stains...