Word: agnese
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The film tells the actions of three sisters and a maid who wait through the autumn in a country mansion for one of the sisters to die. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) has cancer; her older sister Karin (Ingrid Thulin), the smartest and severest of the group, and her other sister, Maria...
The situation itself doesn't develop. Agnes dies after a couple of harrowing seizures, and her sisters unsuccessfully try to come to terms with her death; they divide the country property up, and leave with their husbands. The film ends with Anna reading of a moment of "perfect happiness" in...
But Bergman is not this time adapting his vision to theatrical convention: the characters are conceived philosophically and each is given a flashback that shows them confronting the one thing they all share--loneliness. We interpret the characters' very limited present-tense actions with that information; and when each expresses...
We are first given Agnes's memories of her childhood; and indeed, it becomes clear that she has not progressed very far beyond it. She is a frightened and sorrowful child who can't join in family gaiety, nor be comforted by her mother (herself a tormented woman). Not nurtured...
MARIA'S VISION of her past comes directly after Agnes's, and it prepares us emotionally for her death. After a doctor gives Agnes a routine examination, Maria tries to seduce him; she fails, and thinks back to the time she and the doctor were last together--the doctor had...