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Cries,
whispers, silence and space :
death and the family in films by Pialat, Bergman and
Ozu par Maximilian Le Cain
La Gueule ouverte (1974)
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Rather than being seen as a linear narrative progression,
with character developments and resolutions, it might
be more instructive to view Cries and whispers
in terms of the juxtaposition of points of revelation
of co-existent layers of character in a constant oscillation
between the extremes of death and love embodied by
Andersson’s character and the cruelty (inflicted
as much as endured) and emotional sterility of the
surviving sisters’ daily lives. At first glance
it may seem that Andersson’s character is a
pious vision of the Christian martyr, gentle and saintly,
dying for the sins of those around her. The Priest’s
(Anders Ek) eulogy after her death – one of
the stunning admissions of doubt and helplessness
by a man of God at which Bergman excels, most notably
in Winterlight (1962) but also in The
Serpent’s egg (1976) – would seem
to bear this out : the pain God ‘saw her worthy’
to endure made no difference to her faith that was
‘stronger than mine’. The Priest then
prays that she might intercede for the living before
God (‘if He exists’). Where Bergman counters
this vision of her character is in denying the existence
of absolute states for his characters ; just as the
two surviving sisters remain hellishly trapped between
love, communication and compassion on the one hand
and isolation, alienation and indifference on the
other, so Andersson’s oneiric reappearance suggests
that she is trapped in a horrific state of suspension
between death and life. Everything is in flux, in
torment like Andersson’s racked body : nothing
is resolved, not even in death or by death that at
one point appears to have succeeded in emotionally
uniting the surviving sisters while under the sway
of its potent magnetic field.
Yet comfort does have a tenuous existence, not
at either pole of the interminable struggle between
isolation and love, but outside. Outside in the garden
into which Bergman’s camera follows his characters
only once, beyond the red walls of death, for a short
moment of harmony, a moment where the struggle can
be forgotten. There is no resolution and perhaps no
hope in life, but there are moments of grace and calm,
however fleeting.
Bergman’s immanent, transformative ‘magnetic
field’ of death that moulds space after its
own image and sucks character and viewer alike into
a nightmarish whirlpool of psychodrama is a universe
away from the bedside manner adopted by Pialat in
La Gueule ouverte. While it would, of course,
be untrue to say that the illness that first renders
the wife (Monique Mélinand) of a provincial
draper (Hubert Deschamps) paralysed and bedridden,
and subsequently kills her, does not upset the patterns
of day to day life for her family, it is nevertheless
contained within these rhythms. The tragedy does not
redefine space or time, only rearranges its details.
If a calm moment is, for Bergman’s characters,
the nearest man can aspire to salvation, what is so
horrifying about Pialat’s film is that it never
loses its calm. Sickness and death have never been
treated with such chilling matter-of-factness as a
part of life. Not in a spirit of Zen-like philosophical
detachment, but as a mercilessly physical process.
Death occurs within the prevailing flow of life, but,
unusually, the flow offers no solace as it does in,
for example, Kiarostami’s cinema. In Cries
and whispers, death’s catalytic power is
immense, catharsis follows catharsis resulting in
a complex series of revelations. Not only is catharsis
absent in Pialat, but the significant character development
and self-confrontation that not only Bergman but most
filmmakers would have drawn from this material are
nowhere to be seen- if they do occur, they remain
internal to the characters’ minds and hidden
from the viewer. Throughout the sickness the family
members just continue, carrying on living in the flawed
modes of life that they have adopted. And Pialat doesn’t
judge them for it. They are not evil or callous but
simply themselves.
Take the moment when the draper’s son (Philippe
Léotard) embraces his weeping father immediately
after the death, a rare gesture between these two
men made all the more touching by the actors’
contrasting physiques, the small, stooped Deschamps
looking almost like a crumpled rag doll in the tall,
powerful Léotard’s arms. In a more traditional
film, this would have been seized upon as the perfect
occasion for catharsis, for a deeply bonding moment
between father and son. Not so here. The gesture is
a simple, physical reaction to a physical cause- weeping
and solace. It is not insincere or grudging, yet it
signifies nothing beyond its immediate motivation.
Father and son are no closer. This physical matter-of-factness
is the governing system of behaviour in the film,
unassumingly imposed by father and son whose lives
are largely given to satisfying their sexual urges
in infidelities. Mélinand’s illness may
well be her only way of withdrawing from this mode
of existence or from compliance with it- a way of
living which, while not deliberately vicious, seems
to preclude real communication. As her illness develops,
she loses speech as well as movement, becoming no
more than a gaping mouth that needs to be fed- literally,
the embodiment of a physical appetite. As such, she
is a grotesque, critical mirror of her husband and
son, also the embodiment of appetites, appetites for
sex.
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