Cries and Whispers

This post is part of The Film Experience's excellent Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. 

There are some movies which I've seen and loved, but only need to see once because they are so emotionally disturbing, the prime example being Requiem for a Dream. Cries and Whispers is becoming another candidate. Despite it being a pretty great movie, the emotional violence inflicted by the sisters were so dead on and so scathing, I don't think I can bare to watch it again.

In choosing a shot for this series, I've realised that in many of my earlier HMWYBS choices, I seem to look for shots that offer a calm, cathartic break from the intensity of the movies - see the dull but cathartic hallway scene from Eternal Sunshine, and the relatively bright shot in Batman Returns. This time around, if I applied the same formula, it would be a choice between the dreamy serenity of the mother in the beginning, and the Madonna and child composition near the end. Both shots indulge in the calm escape of a memory (or a fantasy), somehow an escape from the oppressive red, white and black of the house.

But I had to stay true to the emotional horrors of the film. These horrors come from characters who are emotionally trapped by whatever trauma they experienced as children, and are now physically trapped within their macabre childhood house. The film's signature use of saturated crimson is so powerful - it represents not only their trauma and the pain, but also their passion and sexuality, and, in some ways, the comfort of the womb. I found the power of the crimson was in its omnipresence, and my memories are of images of trauma bleeding in and out.

But for the best shot, I've chosen a shot that is a reprieve from the bold crimson but one which nevertheless shows the emotional damage done by the characters:

In this pretty simple close up, we only see part of Marie's face with her lover's mouth intruding on the right. Her face, a beautiful alabaster framed by sensuous red locks, is a tightly controlled mask that bears the brunt of her lover's tormenting words. His words outline all her character flaws through the features of her face: her eyes with its quick calculating side glances, her mouth full of discontent and hunger, her wrinkles of indifference, the smile lines of her easygoing, indolent ways, and the brow lines of her sneering, her impatience, her ennui. This shot captures her face as it registers with many subtle emotions: playfulness, amusement, anger, pride, hurt, fear, and vulnerability.

In a film about the female psyche, and especially when many have viewed the four central women as "as four aspects of one and the same person", it's an excellent representation of the pressures faced by women, both physically and emotionally. She must act desirable but also subservient. She must look sexual but not too sexual. In some ways, it's a tribute to the strength of Marie that if she seems the victim here, she very quickly turns it back onto her lover, retorting that he himself is the same, and that is why they are so suited. It's the mark of a person who's faced such criticisms (and many others) before, and who knows exactly how to respond with as much venom.

But on a greater level, in a film and filmography concerned with morality and questions about the absence of a god, this shot is also a perfect example of the battle we face within ourselves. In Bergman's modern world, we have either rejected the supreme being or have been abandoned by Him/Her. We're now in our own space with nothing else but that voice in our heads that reinforces all the obsessions and insecurities that we've learned from society. Devoid of some greater force telling us how we should act and that it's all going to be okay, we're left with our own destructive whispers. And in this film at least, our only response is a lonely cry back, heard by no-one who can help.