Rating: 4.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 24/52 | Starring Liv Ullmann
19th Century Sweden Agnes lay asleep, her breathing labored. Her eyes open, watery. A strong wave comes over her, and she writhes in pain. Her brow furrows as she drinks what water she can.
She pulls aside the rich red bedsheet and dabs her eyes with her shawl before wrapping it around her. At her writing desk, she dips the pen in an ornate inkwell and writes in her diary:
It is early Monday morning, and I am in pain.
She puts a thick underline beneath the word “pain.”
My sisters and Anna are taking turns staying up.
Anna dresses for the day and prays to God, thanking him for rest and beseeching him to watch over her daughter, whom God took from her. In her daughter’s absence, Anna has given herself to caring for Agnes in Agnes’s remaining days.
Agnes recalls their mother, now passed, walking the mansion grounds. She thinks about how her mother could be as cold as she could be loving — a trait Agnes understands now. Agnes remembers how mother and Maria whispered together in ways she never did with Agnes. But also of the moments of silence when both understood life’s unbearable loneliness.
The doctor, David, comes to see Agnes. Her face glows with recognition. He listens to her heartbeat and feels for sensitive places. She takes his hand in hers and holds it to her chest. As he leaves, he tells Karin, “I don’t think it will be long now.”
Like many siblings, each sister feels alone in their pain, physical or mental. To be alive is to experience an unrelenting emptiness, and to die is to be so replete with pain that no one can find a way in. They each carry their torment in silence, unable to share. The film follows them as each pain comes to the surface — how each daughter is an aspect of their mother, who felt unknowable in her multitude.
Thanks to Roger Corman, this film received solid US distribution, which likely aided in the movie receiving a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
As with Bergman’s best films, the human qualities that give the story life are in the cinematic language — that which words alone cannot convey. The cinematography swings between stillness and cursive freneticism, pushing in and drawing across characters.
This color scheme gives the movie an almost allegorical quality. The interiors are every shade of red and white, some brightly tinted and others subdued. The transitions fade to red and then to the next scene.
Unfortunately, that visual language, as poetic as it is, also creates an emotional distance — Bergman makes every nuance known but not necessarily felt. That absence keeps me from giving this a higher score.
Still, this is a beautifully realized meditation on misery that manages to evade dourness while giving little solace.