Autumn sonata movie review full#

Eva also has a mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a world-renowned concert pianist, and the emotions she feels towards this imposing figure are all over the place: despondent awe over her talent, desperate desire to be loved by her, unyielding hatred of her for a lifetime of slights, insults, wounds, and outright abuse. The heart of the scenario is that Eva (Liv Ullmann) lives a quiet life in the country with her husband Viktor (Halvar Björk), and incredibly boring but stable man, and her sister Helena (Lena Nyman), who has a disability that leaves her with negligible control over her body and a difficulty forming words, such that Eva is the only person with whom she can communicate.

Ingrid Bergman isn't even playing the main character, though, so we probably should put all of that on hold long enough to actually sketch out the fundamentals of what we're dealing with. And I would love to at this point segue blithely into a declaration that, well, we will be focused on the film itself, but the reality is that the Dance of the Bergmans makes that impossible - the fundamental gulf between the style of screen acting that Ingrid drew from and the style of screen acting that Ingmar was trying to push her towards actively and deeply colors what the narrative can even be in the first place. The film's narrative is a good one, a small and punishingly honest scrap of interpersonal conflict made out almost entirely of grace notes but the meta-narrative is such a barnburner that it almost makes it hard to tell.

Autumn sonata movie review full#

This means, among other things, that if I am to write a review that can be even remotely understood, I have to write something other than their last name (they were not, for the record, related), which means you'll see a lot of 'Ingrid did this', 'Ingmar did that' for the rest of this piece, like I'm their most intimate buddy, or some damn thing (also the director was at this time married to the woman born Ingrid Karlebo, meaning that there were two Ingrid Bergmans on set at times)īut what it mostly means is that Autumn Sonata cannot help but arrive on our doorstep with an extraordinary amount of baggage, the full weight of what the two Bergmans had cultivated as their personae over the years crushing down on the fragile dramatic spine of the movie (Ingmar implied later on that the project was not conceived with Ingrid specifically in mind). This is, before it is anything else, the single collaboration between the two most internationally famous representatives of the Swedish film industry, * the one where iconic AAA-level Hollywood movie star Ingrid Bergman and legendary art house director Ingmar Bergman pooled their talents in a film that has, ironically, not a single öre of Swedish money it (if I have the story right, it was a West German company taking money from the United Kingdom to film at an old studio in Norway). One cannot grapple with 1978 Autumn Sonata, not in any of the ways it's doing pretty much anything, without going straight to the most blazingly obvious.