Autumn Sonata

The similarity between the names Ingmar Bergman and Ingrid Bergman used to confuse me, especially as my eyes flitted over a headline.  Last night, I had the opportunity to see the two come together in one magnificent movie -- Autumn Sonata (1978) -- with Ingmar, of course, as director and Ingrid as one of the two lead actors.

In most of Bergman's films that I've watched, much of his plot is conveyed by long periods of silence.  In Autumn Sonata, there is little silence.  Instead, there are long conversations -- often competing monologues -- by Ingrid Bergman and Liz Ullman.  Both offer stunningly virtuoso performances.

Ullman plays Eva, the plain-faced wife of a Norwegian pastor living in a beautiful rural home.  Eva and her husband invite Eva's mother Charlotte to visit, following the death of her mother's husband or long-time companion Leonardo.  Eva has not seen her mother -- an aging but still-glamorous, world-renowned concert pianist --for seven years.

After a joyful greeting between the two, with her mother declaring her intent to stay "forever," things begin immediately to go wrong.  Eva mentions that she still plays occasionally for her local church group, to their acclaim.  Her mother asks her to play the Chopin prelude whose sheet music is on the piano.  Eva hesitates, but does so.  The mother says that the technique and fingering need improvement, but the main problem is with the interpretation.  Chopin was agitated at this time of his life, but he was "manly."  The piece shouldn't be played as a reverie, but should display the pain Chopin felt.  Charlotte plays her own interpretation, which she mentions was well-received when she played it with the Los Angeles Symphony.

Eva wilts.

The two talk.  Charlotte had never come to see the couple's beloved young son Erik, who died when he was four.  Nor had she visited her younger daughter, Helena, Eva's sister, who suffers from a severe degenerative disease that now prevents her from walking or speaking in a way that anyone other than Eva can understand.  In fact, Charlotte is horrified that Helena is in the house under Eva's care, and that she will have to speak with her.

Charlotte manages the meeting with Helena well, showing every sign of being a loving mother.  Helena's love for her mother is obvious.  This is the first of many instances where Charlotte shows that she is and always has been a good actor -- but Eva says that one of the horrors of her childhood was discovering that the way her mother looked and talked was always a lie.  Her expressions had no relationship to how she really felt.

The film reaches a climax one evening after Eva has had a few glasses of wine and spills out the resentments of a life time.  She had desperately loved her mother and sought her approval, but her mother was always leaving on tour.  When Charlotte did finally decide to stay home and get to know her teenaged daughter better, she took on Eva as a "project."  She was going to improve not only Eva's piano skills, but every aspect of her life.

You said my hair was too long and you had it cut short, it was hideous! Then you thought that I had crooked teeth, and you got me braces, I looked so grotesque! You would buy me books and I would read them and not understand them, and you would make me talk about them, and I would always be afraid that you would show up my stupidity.

Her mother defended herself -- she had suffered constant back pain; she had responsibilities as a musician that took her away from home; she simply wanted to help Eva grow up.  Eva responded, pointing out the many times that Charlotte had left her and Helena before the time originally scheduled, as though she couldn't wait to get away from them.  Time after time, Eva was stung by her mother's rejection, rejected because she wasn't good enough.  She had grown up staring at herself in the mirror, hating what she saw.

But one thing I did understand: not a shred of the real me could be loved or accepted. I didn't dare to be myself even when I was alone because I hated what was my own.

All that was sensitive and delicate, you attacked. All that was alive, you tried to smother.

Eva now feels crippled emotionally -- she can't even believe in the reality of her own husband's love. 

She wonders if every injured mother passes on her own injured nature to her daughter.  

Helena has heard the argument and has dragged herself from her bed to the edge of the room, calling as best she can, "Mama!  Mama!"  No one hears her.

Shattered and alone in her room, Charlotte wonders in a soliloquy:

I'm seized by fear and see a horrible picture of myself. I have never grown up. My face and my body have aged. I acquire memories and experiences but inside all that I haven't even been born. I can't remember any faces not even my own.

In less talented hands -- both directorial and acting -- this drama might have come off as a soap opera.  But it does not.  The camera searches deeply into the soul of each woman as she speaks, their faces saying even more than the their words how badly each has been injured, and how much each had wanted to love the other.