Cries and Whispers - A Haunting and Stylish Portrayal of Grief
No other director has the ability to portray human emotions as meticulously as Bergman. I watched Cries and Whispers last week, and I have not stopped thinking about it ever since. Its haunting portrayal of death, grief, and the complexity of relationships is hard to forget. The film has a reputation for its stylish set and costume design, but its colors convey so much more than style. The color red depicts the extreme state of emotions the characters experience. All the characters wear white before Agnes's death and black—the color of grief—after she dies. He uses every element of a film to depict a certain detail. Every color, every shadow, and light is used to tell the story. As he mentioned in his interviews, he is profoundly fascinated with the human face; he views it as a canvas for expressing the depth of human emotions. Instead of relying on dialogue, Bergman shows the mental states of the characters through their facial expressions. For example, in the first part, when the
