Tissue of Lies

CRIES AND WHISPERS is Ingmar Bergman's examination of the anguish each human being undergoes when he first discovers that man has no defenses: that transcendent faith in an otherworldly God answers none of his urgent earthly needs; that a developing intellect may bring with it a ruthless hunt for truth repelling all human contact; and that sensuality in itself can only occasionally relieve the pain of a personal void, and might even start a personality festering. The film is Bergman's most complete response to the traditional wisdoms: persevere in faith and you'll be rewarded, gain understanding and wisdom will be yours, love is easy for the loving.

If the film fails to satisfy us intellectually--the condemnation of the people it encloses is total, so it leaves us without any human base on which to build our beliefs--it is an immaculately conceived, and nearly perfectly achieved work of art. It must be taken as a philosophical statement; all the characters operate within clearly-defined boundaries, and we respond to them only as far as they fulfill the requirements of the whole. But when placed in the context of Bergman films, it is also a human document inspiring awe in the filmmaker's moral courage, and faith in his artistry.

The film tells the actions of three sisters and a maid who wait through the autumn in a country mansion for one of the sisters to die. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) has cancer; her older sister Karin (Ingrid Thulin), the smartest and severest of the group, and her other sister, Maria (Liv Ullmann) an overripe coquette, have temporarily left their husbands--a diplomat and a businessman--to nurse her at their childhood home. The peasant girl, Anna (Kari Sylwa), is a servant who has been with the family for years and is devoted to Agnes.

The situation itself doesn't develop. Agnes dies after a couple of harrowing seizures, and her sisters unsuccessfully try to come to terms with her death; they divide the country property up, and leave with their husbands. The film ends with Anna reading of a moment of "perfect happiness" in Agnes's diary--an August afternoon; she was well enough to leave her bed and walk on the grounds with her newly-arrived sisters to a swing, where Anna gently rocks them to and fro in the summer air.

But Bergman is not this time adapting his vision to theatrical convention: the characters are conceived philosophically and each is given a flashback that shows them confronting the one thing they all share--loneliness. We interpret the characters' very limited present-tense actions with that information; and when each expresses an insufficient response toward Agnes's death, we realize it is because they have only the barest grip on life.

We are first given Agnes's memories of her childhood; and indeed, it becomes clear that she has not progressed very far beyond it. She is a frightened and sorrowful child who can't join in family gaiety, nor be comforted by her mother (herself a tormented woman). Not nurtured in an atmosphere in which she could easily express her fears and doubts, she represses them, and funnels her passions into her religious beliefs: anything she likes becomes an emanation of divine grace. She is always referred to as being ill, even in the older sisters' flashbacks; and, though her minister claims her faith had rock-ribbed strength, she dies in agony.

MARIA'S VISION of her past comes directly after Agnes's, and it prepares us emotionally for her death. After a doctor gives Agnes a routine examination, Maria tries to seduce him; she fails, and thinks back to the time she and the doctor were last together--the doctor had been a failed suitor of Maria's. When he met her then, he had come to the mansion to treat the sick child of the servant-woman. Maria was married and bored. She invited the doctor to stay for supper, and then for the night; the weather was dreadful, she said, and her husband was in town on business. She later goes to his room and offers herself. The doctor tells her she has changed, become cold, indifferent and calculating, while Maria says that she "needs no pardon" and argues that it is all the doctor's projection of his own feelings. They make love. The next morning, Maria's husband attempts suicide. Though she must have come to his aid at some point, when he committed the act and cried out for help, she was repelled, and refused him. At the redout which opens and closes her chapter, Maria's eyes dart to a hidden stimulus, and she quivers.

Karin, on the other hand, cries out silently. Her soul is mortified. She has questioned the meanings behind her surroundings and come up with negative answers, and this has--perhaps temporarily--obstructed her compassion. After Agnes's death, she recalls a dinner with her husband. Enduring cold, light-weight badinage, Karin looks at him with withering contempt; when the contempt goes out of control, so does she. A glass breaks, and her husband suggests they go to bed. Karin stays at the table, fingers a broken shard, and repeats to herself, "It's all a tissue of lies." When Anna helps her undress, she sees the servant smiling dumbly at her; she slaps Anna, and then apologizes. The nurse is not mocking her; she is only stupid, and can't comprehend Karin's hatred. After the peasant leaves, Karin takes the fragment of glass, and cuts into her clitoris. Her face at first breaks into a contemptuous grin; then into a parody of an orgasmic expression. She joins her husband, lies on their bed, and lifts her nightgown to show her bleeding. Gleefully mocking his sexual desires, she takes blood on her fingers, smears it on her mouth, and licks it suggestively.

THE FINAL first person episode is not a memory but a dream. Anna, who has been Agnes's most constant companion, hears weeping in the night; at first, it seems a baby's howl, but her own child has long been dead. She runs to Agnes's room; outside, Karin and Maria stand silent and motionless. She goes to Agnes, and sees a tear running down the corpse's face. Agnes asks Anna for Karin, but when Karin enters the older sister rejects the younger: "I want no part of your death...If I loved you it might be different, but I don't love you." It is a cogent argument. Maria enters next, and with her uncontrolled emotionalism comes close to embracing her dead sister; but she finally is frightened, and runs off, not wanting to be dragged down. Only Anna, with the unexamined Christian faith which every day makes her thank her God for taking her natural daughter, cares for Agnes, her symbolic daughter; she comforts her on a mountainous bared breast, a pose which evokes both maternalism and highly charged overtones of distorted sexuality. Like Agnes, Anna has a faith which she feels will conquer all and resolve all; but as Agnes's has been neurotic, Anna's faith is simply fantastic.

The entire film is based on the family's tissue of lies. Prior to Anna's dream, Karin and Maria attempt to make a sisterly connection. Maria instigates it; Karin denies, reading her hollow character with a sad and insightful malice. Both finally collapse into each other's arms; but after the funeral, when their husbands take them away, Maria gets back at Karin's initial contempt by reducing their stab at friendship to a "silly little thing." We are left to wonder what a mother they must have had, embodying all their impulses but resolving none, ignoring Karin and Agnes, and taking refuge in Maria's delightful girlishness.

Aside from lovers and husbands, the only visitor to the house is the minister who comes to pray at Agnes's deathbed. Bergman admires the minister's recognition of the need for moral faith, and his sincerity and fervor; but his unfolding of a stern Calvinist credo becomes pathetic, particularly as he begins to cry, and tells the sisters that Agnes's faith was stronger than his own. When he leaves with his androgynous layers-out, we are made sharply aware that, for all its period trappings, this is a story about Western man caught in a post-Christian world.

Each of these characters represents a mode of action which is insufficient for sustenance in a world where simple faith has become impossible. Agnes is strangled by a faith which permits her no earthly satisfactions; Anna is supported by it, but Anna can exist only by serving others as a maternal breast; Maria's surface emotion hides her coldness and fear of true emotional commitment; Karin's analysis is harshly correct, but she lacks faith even in her own analysis and is therefore defeated by its truth. Each has failed to confront reality, which is composed not only of intellect, emotion and belief, but of transcendent faith which enunciates life's governing principle and thereby makes life bearable.

PERHAPS MOST of the bewilderment which has greeted the film comes from Pauline Kael's typically confused notion that it depicts "women as the Other." But the film is interested not in these women's emotion, but the intelligence and intuitions which direct these emotions. The case can be made much more purely with women because they are so human, and here are divorced from any encounter with external social conflicts. Bergman, in fact, makes a far more subtle dig at the bourgeois than Kael gives him credit for: the men are cartoon figures, unable to bring their families any ordering values from their work. Beyond that, even after the social revolution, we will all have to face the problems these sisters encounter.

As usual, Bergman includes references to his own previous works--e.g., Maria and her husband plan to visit the Egermans, the eminently bourgeois family of Passion of Anna. Also to be expected are the wonderful Sven Nykvist photography, the clever color design (red for lust and guilt, white for innocence, black for death) and the impeccable performances. But Bergman's characteristic flaws are present as well. Occasionally, a scene becomes annoyingly stylized: Karin looks at that piece of glass for what seems like a full five minutes, and the talk in which she and Maria finally commit themselves is smothered by caresses and Chopin. The dialogue is sometimes brittle and ridiculously abstracted (Karin talks of suicide at the slightest provocation--this might just be the English subtitles).

But Bergman's fine structure and masterful direction of visuals and actors finally overcomes his minor clumsiness. Now his main challenge is philosophic. He must commit himself to an even harder task than the one he has set himself here. He must start to give us his solutions to problems of these characters' lives.