"It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so indiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygenic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria and pleasant," - Joseph Roth, 1929
Cries and Whispers is a beautiful elegy for an era, now so far from memory it might as well be myth. The European bourgeois let their pain be perfumed and ornamented and perfumed until it rotted away.
When the rot finally gave way, the houses were sold, possessions divvied - and decadence prevailed. People who have lost their confidence and optimism are easy to whip into the most destructive behaviors.
This all too human exploration of our weakness and pain and hate and need is a visual poem in how humanity is traded away moment by moment. It’s overwhelming cinematic beauty only deepens the metaphor.