Word: ullmann
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Cries and Whispers. Bergman's latest, filmed with a crimson colored Gothic expressionism reminiscent of Edvard Munch. Set in a turn of the century manor house, two sisters (Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin) along with a peasant servant (Kari Sylwun) attend their dying sister (Harriet Andersson). Bergman uses the women schematically--the Woman as Other--to play out his 'nothingness' theme: the ultimate isolation of every human being, the tissue of lies that passes for communication between men, the meaningless of extra-human faith, the nothingness at the heart of it. Harvard Square...
...irritating plot concerns the bumpy progress of a generation-gap love affair between a Manhattan real estate woman (Ullmann), who is 40 years old and tense about it, and the head of labor relations for a large steel company (Edward Albert), who is a vehemently mature 22. They meet on holiday in Greece. Her car expires; he persuades her, with difficulty, to accept a lift on his Honda, plies her with ouzo, and after a while-too long a while -they spend a blissful night together on the beach. They meet again in New York, where he shows...
...Ullmann is still a fine actress. That is easy enough to see in 40 Carats without, thankfully, having to pay close attention to the movie. It is difficult to imagine who might want to pay attention, who might seek out and revel in this shriveled farce with its stilted people and wilted jokes...
...Carats is a brazenly ugly film in the way only Hollywood studio products can be when they try to look stylish. Miss Ullmann is deft and charming despite it all. When she kisses Albert goodbye the morning after their beach idyll, she brushes her lips close to his face in a moment of quiet poignancy; later, when she describes Albert and defends their relationship, she speaks with glee and the pride of a woman feeling a kind of renewal...
However good they are, these moments do not resolve the central question of what Ullmann, one of the screen's best young actresses, is doing in a film so deadeningly unimaginative and mechanical. 40 Carats is better than Lost Horizon-anything would be -but it is perilously below her best abilities...