![]() Her performance is stunted, tentative, and amateurish, and she immediately senses her mother’s condescension in her strained compliments (“You didn’t like it,” Eva says, to which Charlotte replies, “I liked you”). The tension between mother and daughter, however, is best seen in the scene in which Eva plays Chopin’s Prelude no. Helena suffers from an unnamed debilitating “illness” that renders her entirely dependent on others bodily distorted and incapable of speaking in anything beyond grunts and moans, she is the physical manifestation of Charlotte’s parental sins, a point that Eva drives home in the film’s most emotionally devastating moment when she fully accuses her mother of being responsible for Helena’s condition. The first real moment of tension comes when Eva informs her mother that her younger sister, Helena (Lena Nyman, the star of the scandalous Swedish drama I Am Curious-Yellow), is living with her and Viktor and not in the home where Charlotte had put her years ago. Eva is the primary instigator, which makes us wonder if her decision to invite her mother was driven primarily by a subconscious desire to confront her with all her pain-to unleash what she has been repressing virtually all of her life. However, it isn’t long before the first barbed words slip out, and sly accusations begin the process of digging up the past, revealing old hurts and jabbing at never-healed wounds. Charlotte accepts the invitation immediately, perhaps because she gravely fears being alone, and when she first arrives it seems that all is well, as mother and daughter exchange pleasantries and seem genuinely glad to see each other. Yet, it is Eva who seeks out her mother, writing her a letter when she learns that Charlotte’s longtime lover has recently died and inviting her to come stay at the parsonage. The film opens, in fact, with Viktor speaking directly to us, explaining his relationship with Eva and how he doesn’t feel that she can fully accept his love, the first indication that her emotional core has been mortally wounded by her relationship with Charlotte. The inherently theatrical nature of a chamber drama-a small number of characters confined to a limited set-is enhanced by Bergman’s pointed use of soliloquys throughout the film to allow his characters to express their inner turmoil, as well as the use of direct address. ![]() The majority of the action takes place over a 24-hour period in the remote Norwegian parsonage Eva shares with her older husband, Viktor (Halvar Björk), a genial, pipe-smoking pastor. The film has a steady, accumulating power, and while it ranks high among Bergman’s dramas, it is not quite a masterpiece, at least not on the level of Cries and Whispers (1972) and Scenes From a Marriage (1973), his signature films of the period. Like Persona, Autumn Sonata is a film about female psychology, in this case the pent-up rage of a daughter who feels that her mother has deserted her and the mother’s struggle to justify her parental apathy via her own emotional neglect. The role of the plain-looking, thirtysomething daughter, Eva, went to Liv Ullman, a regular collaborator with the writer/director who had first appeared in his groundbreaking drama Persona (1966) and had appeared in eight subsequent films. The two Bergmans had planned to work together for more than a decade, and when Ingmar wrote the script, he specifically had Ingrid in mind. The mother, Charlotte, a driven concert pianist now in her 60s, is played by the great Ingrid Bergman in her last major screen performance (she would die a few years later of the cancer she was fighting while the film was in production). Stars: Ingrid Bergman (Charlotte), Liv Ullmann (Eva), Lena Nyman (Helena), Halvar Björk (Viktor), Arne Bang-Hansen (Uncle Otto), Gunnar Björnstrand (Paul), Erland Josephson (Josef), Georg Løkkeberg (Leonardo), Linn Ullmann (Eva as a child)įollowing the critical and commercial failure of The Serpent’s Egg (1977), a German-American coproduction starring David Carradine set in postwar Berlin, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman returned to more intimate, familiar territory in Autumn Sonata ( Höstsonaten), an intensely felt chamber drama about the emotionally explosive reunion of a wounded daughter and her self-absorbed mother who haven’t seen each other for seven years.
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