Cries and Whispers - Ingmar Bergman

This film is cold, very cold. Being my second Ingmar Bergman picture, I walked away from this feeling a little depressed and having the need to go off and hide somewhere, it is that moving of a film. It is a tale of three sisters from an aristocratic family in Sweden during the 19th Century and the coldness they face between each other, the servant Anna, and their significant others. This film plainly states that an aristocratic society is not all it is cracked up to be, perhaps because it is just so goddamn cold. The use of the colour red is immediately striking and well thought out, Bergman himself once said that the colour red in this film represents the varying membranes of the human soul (quote from IMDB), and as far as I am concerned, it is absolutely brilliant. Being my first Bergman film in colour (ref. The Seventh Seal), I am reminded of Stanley Kubrick's use of colour in his interpretation of The Shining, and it suggests the same debilitating effects to those in Cries and Whispers. I do not have a lot to say about the film because I was overwhelmed throughout, my senses were consistently tested and bludgeoned at the same time. The film is a masterpiece as far as I am concerned, the actors were beyond my comprehension (the males were incessant pricks and the women were cold as ice, with a few exceptions of course). Lastly, the looks the actors gave to the camera are haunting to say the least, I felt that I was part of this denouement, and in my head I probably was; kudos to Bergman for another excellent picture.