Feels like The Silence remade with the visual style of Autumn Sonata, and minus my favorite part (little Johan and the colorful characters he meets in the hotel). So we’re left with two sisters who hate each other and a dying third sister whom they both hate. All the relentless grim hopelessness is killing my Bergman-love momentum that started with Monika, Magician and Smiles… after this, I was gonna rewatch Persona, but instead I watched some sci-fi movies about the death of all humanity (Alien 6 and the Resident Evil series) and those seemed relatively upbeat.
Agnes (Harriet Andersson: Monika, the daughter in Through a Glass Darkly) is deathly ill in bed, tended by the maid Anna. Liv Ullmann (Ingrid’s daughter in Autumn Sonata) plays bright-eyed sister Maria and also their mom in flashbacks, and Ingrid Thulin (Winter Light, The Magician) is dark-haired older sister Karin.
Maria is cheating with the Doctor: Erland Josephson, baron of Hour of the Wolf
“Pray for those of us left behind on this dark and miserable earth beneath a cruel and empty sky.”
D’Angelo didn’t love it: “The dour humorlessness; the mannered performances; the ticking clocks that infiltrate portentous silences with metronomic reminders of mortality; the overwrought arias of verbal cruelty; the expository flashbacks; the random mood swings designed merely to startle…it’s as close as he ever came to self-parody.” Wonder if Mike has seen Hour of the Wolf, which I thought was even more self-parody.
Undead Agnes comforted by Maid Anna:
Scene transitions are accompanied by haunted whispers on the soundtrack, and the overall look is a rich red, red, red, populated by some of the most beautiful actresses in the world. So maybe I should try appreciating it as a gorgeous horror movie. A Kogonada video explains the structural and thematic brilliance, and has a happier ending than the film itself.
Ingrid Thulin at dinner:
Nominated for five oscars including picture, and won best cinematography over The Exorcist. Day for Night won best foreign film, for which this movie wasn’t nominated – strange. Played Cannes out of competition – the only movie I’ve seen from that year’s fest is O Lucky Man!