A film about family trauma and the search for forgiveness. One of the best-known films by classic director Ingmar Bergman.
Eva, the wife of a village pastor, invites her mother Charlotte, a world-famous pianist, to visit. They have not seen each other for seven years. However, the guest gets a surprise. Eva has brought her paralyzed sister to live with her, who Charlotte had placed in a clinic. The sincere desire to rekindle the family relationship involves a series of painful discoveries and encounters with the mistakes of the past. The culmination of the film, a sleepless night of confessions of love and hate, became a classic not just in Bergman’s oeuvre but in the history of cinema.
A master of intimate drama and a stubborn existentialist, Bergman honed his style to almost crystalline purity for his fortieth film. There is nothing extraneous in Autumn Sonata, simply a family portrait in an interior where gestures conceal the taut strings of internal contradictions, unhappiness, and a desperate desire for love. The theatrical nature of the film can be seen in the focus on close-ups and the subtle acting of two great actresses, Bergman’s talisman Liv Ullmann and the director’s namesake Ingrid Bergman, a legend of American cinema who starred in Casablanca by Michael Curtiz and Gaslight by George Cukor. These roles were written for them «and only them, ” as the director noted in his book Images. This was Ingrid Bergman’s only work with the director and her final big-screen role. It was Liv Ullmann’s last shoot with the great Swede before a fifteen-year break. The actresses invested so much in these characters that every viewing reveals new nuances, meaning you can watch this complex dialectic of blame and forgiveness over and over again. Autumn Sonata, more than any other film by Bergman, manifests theologist and film critic Amédée Ayfre’s formula: the absence of God is evidence of the presence of God.
Autumn Sonata
Director Ingmar Bergman
Germany, UK, 1978. 99 min.
16+