Bergman's "Cries and Whispers"

Heart-breaking scene from Cries and Whispers

Do you want to know the most difficult film for me to watch? Would you like to know of a film that ruptures my tear-sacs into almost phlegmatic-weariness, yet strikes me with the accomplishment of the habitual-emotion of blatant pliancy? Would you like to be informed of a film that is painful for me to view, yet a film that has me yearning for more of the same pain? That almost peculiar feeling of "pleasure" and "pain"; the seemingly realistic frequencies of a film's believabilities, of the human behavior: the power of emotion, the melancholies of sickness and Death; the bizarre submissiveness of Life; "the world of women" that "is very open of (...) gender and sexual politics" at the turn-of-the-century (19th); one of the most moving films I have ever seen? The "erotic mystery" (the "physical decay") of four sisters ("each representing a different aspect of a woman") that embraces you immediately with their presence, traits and idealogies? Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers is this film. Bergman himself explained from the initial script: What it most resembles is a dark flowing stream: faces, movements, voices, gestures, exclamations, light and shade, moods, dreams. Nothing fixed, nothing really tangible other than for the moment, and then only an illusory moment. A dream, a longing, or perhaps an expectation, a fear, in which that to be feared is never put into words. It's really all there. I find every emotion seeping out of me when I watch this film. I find that I somehow become those faces, movements, voices, gestures, exclamations, light and shades and every bit, ounce, degree and shape and folds and formations of those moods and dreams...