![]() The amount of harm that Charlotte has inflicted over one not-terribly-long lifetime could fill a miniseries. ![]() ![]() There’s so much else to choose from, like putting Helena in a home and never visiting. Evidently, Charlotte never came even after Erik died, although no one bothers to throw that at her. I hadn’t one day free,” she reminds Viktor). She didn’t just leave Eva and her son-in-law alone Charlotte didn’t show up for Eva’s pregnancy or her one grandchild’s birth (“I was recording all the Mozart sonatas. She wasn’t just absent on tour for much of Eva’s childhood, leaving the girl to keep vigil with her father (Erland Josephson) Charlotte had an affair that resulted in her leaving both husband and children for eight months (the child Eva, shown in flashback, is played by Linn Bergman). Each revelation about Charlotte comes like another page of the indictment. And Autumn Sonata represents another variation on the intimate family miseries of his other pinnacles from that period-preoccupied with physical and moral frailty, like Cries and Whispers (1972), full of recriminations for crimes the other person doesn’t recollect committing, like Scenes from a Marriage (1973).įor Autumn Sonata, Bergman built his screenplay around exposition. Up until the tax contretemps, he had been spending the decade making some of the best films of his career. And it was also his last work made expressly for the cinema F rom the Life of the Marionettes, Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Saraband (2003) were made for television.īut Autumn Sonata also connects back to Bergman’s earlier seventies films. Autumn Sonata’s close quarters and big confrontations seem to anticipate the director’s later focus on the theater. In retrospect, this part of his career seems as much like a long, slow transition from screen to stage as an exile. And after Autumn Sonata-filmed in Norway, Ullmann’s home country, in about fifteen days-he would also make From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) outside Sweden. From his exile, he had already made The Serpent’s Egg (1977), which didn’t find much success. He was released after five hours, and the courts eventually dismissed the case, but the lèse-majesté had been more than he could bear. In 1976, that country’s most famous filmmaker had been picked up by the police for tax evasion. That isn’t the case.īergman’s closely observed account of how one daughter’s disabling rage builds to a devastating all-night confrontation with her mother was created during his self-imposed exile from his native Sweden. Charlotte arrives, vivacious as ever, and seems to think that her debts have already been paid. ![]() In that time, Eva has married a minister, Viktor (Halvar Björk) has had a son, Erik, who drowned before his fourth birthday and has been caring for her sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), who is dying, slowly and horribly, from a degenerative disease. Charlotte is a famed pianist whose glamorous life hasn’t included a visit to her daughter in seven years. He didn’t say why, nor did he need to.įilmed by Sven Nykvist in the haunting palette suggested by its title, Autumn Sonata uses Bergman’s signature technique of tightly focused close-ups in an almost claustrophobically small setting to tell the story of a daughter, Eva (Ullmann), who invites her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), for a visit. The director later said that when he conceived Autumn Sonata, he considered no other actresses for the two main roles. As for Ullmann, just the year before she had written, “Success in one’s profession and trying to write a book do not compensate for domestic shortcomings as obvious as mine.” She was referring to her relationship with her daughter, Linn, whose father was Ingmar Bergman. But when Bergman left her husband for Roberto Rossellini, she went years without seeing her daughter from her first marriage. Both of the film’s stars, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman, had daughters as well as celebrated careers. We are all some mother’s daughter, whether we were cherished or abandoned, spoiled or abused. A utumn Sonata (1978) cuts deep into a woman, even if she recoils from it.
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