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 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 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 tension between mother and daughter, however, is best seen in the scene in which Eva plays Chopin’s Prelude no. 2 in A Minor for Charlotte. 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”). When Eva insists that Charlotte explain to her what she did wrong, Charlotte slips into a pedantic teacher-student mode, busily explaining to Eva the difference between emotion and sentimentality and how Chopin intended the piece of express a sense of hurt, during which time we can sense Eva’s anger welling and boiling. This little moment of musical explication carries with it decades of emotional pain, as it reminds Eva how she always took a back seat to Charlotte’s musical career, standing perpetually in the shadow of her mother’s fervent desire to be loved and applauded as an artist, not a mother.

As was typical of Bergman’s later chamber films, Autumn Sonata was shot almost entirely in close-ups, with the exception of the flashbacks, which are staged like Vermeer paintings, their theatrical, physical distance putting them in stark contrast to the immediacy of the present-tense action, the acute pain of which is deeply informed by both Bergman’s concerns about his own failed parenting and his still-conflicted relationship with his parents, particularly his father. Bergman’s longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist mixes tones of warmth and chilliness, making us feel the autumn air outside just as surely as we feel the escalating hostility between Eva and Charlotte.

The constant close-ups demand performances of great power and subtlety, and Bergman elicits two great ones from Bergman and Ullman. Stories about the various disputes between the two Bergmans are quite legendary, as the actress, who had spent much of her later career acting onstage, came prepared with an entirely different performance style than the director was expecting, and they clashed often and frequently during the first week of shooting before settling into a mutual understanding that resulted in one of Bergman’s finest performances. The multi-Oscar-winning star of such Hollywood classics as Casablanca (1942) and Notorious (1946) carries with her the golden glow of true stardom, albeit tinged with the weight of age and declining physical health (Bergman’s real-life cancer surely inflected the way in which she conveys her character’s exhaustion and back pain). Bergman has a tricky role in that Charlotte is a fundamentally selfish character, and Bergman the director does little to dispel Eva’s accusations that she was, in fact, a monster of a mother, even when she was trying to play the role. When Charlotte offers excuses first and later begs for forgiveness, we feel her pain to the point that we can understand, if not necessarily excuse, how difficult it was for her to love her daughters and why she was so often absent, putting her musical career ahead of everything else.

In that regard, Ullman’s performance is crucial to balancing Bergman’s, as she must embody all the pain and rage of the deserted child, who we see in bittersweet flashbacks (played by Bergman and Ullman’s real-life daughter Linn) being shut out of her mother’s practice room after waiting patiently for her to finish and standing in front of a mirror bemoaning the face and body she thinks is so ugly. Hiding behind wire-rimmed owl glasses, frumpy dresses, and tight braids, Eva is a repressed soul, which makes her eventual explosion so heartrending—a literal pouring out of years of anger, resentment, and disappointment, to the point that there is little hope for forgiveness, much less reconciliation.

In his book Images: My Life in Film, Bergman regrets several aspects of Autumn Sonata, particularly the fact that he abandoned his original, highly experimental approach to the material, which would have consisted almost entirely of tight close-ups of only the two main characters with virtually no background, and each act of the film lit in a different light: evening, night, and morning. Traces of that approach still remain (particularly in the way the film’s narrative structure is reflected in the lighting and time of day), but the final film boasts a much more conventional approach, at least for Bergman, who was fully ensconced in his chamber phase at that point. He recognized the potential problem there, as he found Autumn Sonata to be a “annoying example” of “Bergman making Bergman films.” That is probably a bit harsh, the result of a highly reflective and critical filmmaker thinking back on his work, but it does point up the fact that the best moments of Autumn Sonata, powerful though they are, often draw us to Bergman’s even more powerful films—a criticism, to be fair, that can only be leveled at a truly great director. I’d a take a hundred “Bergman making Bergman” films over most others.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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