With Charlotte being a successful concert pianist, music is understandably presented as a key connection between the two women, and as a major point of dissention. Ranking as one of Bergman’s finest chamber dramas, Autumn Sonata takes this initially hospitable household and steadily develops it into a confining pressure cooker building on the volatile Eva/Charlotte dichotomy. Not one to revel in difficulties that aren’t of her own creation, Charlotte is displeased by this reminder of her other daughter’s affliction, something she has long since tried to forget. To make matters worse, Eva reveals that her handicapped sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), is staying at the house. Then, less than 15 minutes in, the insults start and it’s clear that this visit is not destined to be a pleasant one. At first, it seems Charlotte recognizes her self-centered verbal bluster, but she then proceeds to further discuss her graying hair, her new clothes, her back pain, and so on. “You’re just the same,” replies Eva, who has remained silently off-screen. “Do you think I’ve changed much?” asks Charlotte. Charlotte almost immediately relates in detail the recent death of her lover, Leonardo, and, blind to Eva’s obvious joy at having her mother there, rambles incessantly about herself. It has been seven years since mother and daughter last saw each other, and their reunion quickly gets off to a rocky start. When into this enters Charlotte, very much a worldly and by comparison demanding individual (even her breakfast order is high maintenance), the inevitable conflict begins. The house’s interior suggests a humble situation, as does Ullmann’s unadorned appearance she has never quite looked so demure and vulnerable. But when I get home, I find it’s something else I’m longing for.” In their parsonage, Eva and Viktor are content if not tremendously exciting. Compare this with Charlotte’s comment at the end of the film: “I’m always homesick. Crucially, he twice repeats that Eva has stated, “I feel at home here.” This idea of being comfortable at home and with the simplistic demands that their relatively sedentary life requires is but one point of contrast as Autumn Sonata progresses. Eva writes at her desk while her husband Viktor (Halvar Björk), a minister, directly addresses the camera and brings the audience up to speed on his wife’s back-story. Here the mother/daughter composite of parent Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) and child Eva unleashes an onslaught of conflicting and combative memories, emotions, and personal grudges, all brewing beneath the surface and suddenly liberated during the course of the narrative, in which the harsh realities of a familial relationship in tatters emerge.īergman begins the film with a modest depiction of stable domesticity. More than any other line of dialogue, in what is a remarkably written film, this gets to the crux of the picture’s thematic concerns. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978).
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