Word: marias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 (Liv Ullmann) an overripe coquette, have temporarily left their husbands--a diplomat and a businessman--to nurse her at their childhood home. The peasant girl, Anna (Kari Sylwa), is a servant who has been with the family for years and is devoted to Agnes...
...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 been a failed suitor of Maria's. When he met her then, he had come to the mansion to treat the sick child of the servant-woman. Maria was married and bored. She invited the doctor to stay for supper, and then for the night; the weather was dreadful...
...first person episode is not a memory but a dream. Anna, who has been Agnes's most constant companion, hears weeping in the night; at first, it seems a baby's howl, but her own child has long been dead. She runs to Agnes's room; outside, Karin and Maria stand silent and motionless. She goes to Agnes, and sees a tear running down the corpse's face. Agnes asks Anna for Karin, but when Karin enters the older sister rejects the younger: "I want no part of your death...If I loved you it might be different...
...entire film is based on the family's tissue of lies. Prior to Anna's dream, Karin and Maria attempt to make a sisterly connection. Maria instigates it; Karin denies, reading her hollow character with a sad and insightful malice. Both finally collapse into each other's arms; but after the funeral, when their husbands take them away, Maria gets back at Karin's initial contempt by reducing their stab at friendship to a "silly little thing." We are left to wonder what a mother they must have had, embodying all their impulses but resolving none, ignoring Karin and Agnes...
...characters represents a mode of action which is insufficient for sustenance in a world where simple faith has become impossible. Agnes is strangled by a faith which permits her no earthly satisfactions; Anna is supported by it, but Anna can exist only by serving others as a maternal breast; Maria's surface emotion hides her coldness and fear of true emotional commitment; Karin's analysis is harshly correct, but she lacks faith even in her own analysis and is therefore defeated by its truth. Each has failed to confront reality, which is composed not only of intellect, emotion and belief...