![]() Eva says she was a sensitive, introverted person and that her always imperious, super-confident mother continually made her feel inferior, which suppressed her development growing up. For example, there was the time when Eva was 18 and pregnant, and her mother forced her to have an abortion. The few periods that Charlotte did spend at home, she was, according to Eva, domineering and insensitive to her daughter’s needs. ![]() She complains that her mother was always away from home on concert tours or attending to endless practice and rehearsals. Gradually Eva’s commentary turns into a long diatribe against her mother. Clearly a caring mother should have shown some appreciation for her daughter’s humble attempt to play a piece for her. Although Eva doesn’t say much, we can see that she is traumatized by the way her proud mother has dismissed her efforts. Then Charlotte sits down at the keyboard and plays the same piece the way she thinks it should be played. As she listens to her daughter play, Charlotte can be seen wincing at some of the passages – she doesn’t agree with Eva’s interpretation of the piece. Although Eva is competent at the piano, she is by no means a concert-level pianist like her mother. Although she cannot talk intelligibly, it is clear that Helena is ecstatic to see her long-absent mother.Ī bit later while Charlotte and Eva are talking, Charlotte urges the reluctant Eva to play a piano piece that her daughter has been working on, Chopin’s “Prelude No. But Charlotte now decides to buckle up, and she goes into Helena’s room, where she graciously greets her crippled daughter and puts on a show of motherly affection. Years earlier, when Charlotte had been confronted with her daughter Helena’s deteriorating condition, she had ultimately chosen to have the girl institutionalized and had thereafter never even bothered to go visit Helena there – evidently out of sight, out of mind! So Charlotte is severely uncomfortable about seeing and facing up to Helena now. Helena is suffering from an incurable, degenerative neurological condition that has left her mostly paralyzed and unable to speak intelligibly. The first issue is that Eva reveals that she has taken her severely-handicapped younger sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), out of a medical care home and brought her into her own home to look after her. But when mother and daughter sit down and start talking, troubles arise. When Charlotte arrives at Eva’s country home, she is joyfully greeted by her gracious daughter, who is thrilled to hear that her mother intends to stay there indefinitely. Many of these films featured Liv Ullmann (in addition to Autumn Sonata, these include Persona (1966), Shame ( Skammen, 1968), The Passion of Anna ( En Passion, 1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Scenes from a Marriage ( Scener ur ett Aktenskap, 1973)), who was also a sometime romantic partner of Bergman’s. And with this film Bergman also continued with his relatively later-in-his-career focus on the complex moods and interactions of female psyches. ![]() Nevertheless, he continued to make films during this time, and Autumn Sonata was shot in Norway and produced in West Germany. Although the charges were soon dropped later that year, the now-depressed Bergman went into self-exile for the next four years and thereby cut off his ties with the Swedish filmmaking industry during that period. This was Ingrid Bergman’s last film appearance (and the only collaboration between the two famous Swedish Bergmans), but she gives here one of her most moving performances to cap off her career.Īt the time when this film was made (1977), Ingmar Bergman was going through an anguishing period, because he had been charged and arrested by the Swedish authorities for tax-evasion in 1976. But writer-director Ingmar Bergman, with the help of his two leading actresses, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman, fashioned a gripping psychological drama that keeps the viewer interested all the way, and Autumn Sonata has been highly regarded by a number of critics over the years. Consisting of mostly an extended, bitter colloquy between an elderly mother and her married daughter, one wouldn’t expect material of this nature would be suitable for a fascinating film. One of Ingmar Bergman’s last movies made expressly for the cinema, Autumn Sonata ( Höstsonaten, 1978), was something of a masterpiece in both style and content. ![]()
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