Höstsonaten

Plot synopsis:
Eva (Liv Ullmann), wife of the village pastor, invites her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) for a visit to her village. She has not seen her for over seven years. Her mother is a world-renowned pianist, somewhat eccentric, aging, and has survived several husbands. Eva is not as talented as the mother (despite the fact that she has written two books, and has a passing ability at playing the piano). Eva's main concern is to be the mistress of her home, wife, mother and loving sister. It is gradually learned through her dialogue with her mother that her life has had a large number of unfortunate setbacks: a husband (Halvar Björk) she respects, but does not really have affection for, their son drowned when only 4 years old, and Charlotte never appears to have loved Eva as a mother normally loves a daughter. As part of her day-to-day life, Eva takes care of her disabled and paralyzed sister Helena (Lena Nyman), whom she has taken out of the hospital into her own home; she appears to be the only person who can understand her sister's limited speech ability.
The presence of her younger paralyzed daughter in Eva's house is shocking to the aging mother. She makes a gift of her own wrist watch to her younger paralyzed daughter, and listens to Eva playing Prelude No. 2 in A minor by Chopin. She immediately re-performs the same prelude after Eva finishes in her own preferred interpretation of the music. Before going to bed, Charlotte decides to make a gift of her own car to her daughter. She plans to take a flight home, and buy a new car for herself, as a measure of her altruism. At night, Charlotte wakes up from a nightmare: it seems that Eva is choking her. She gets up, goes into the living room and sees Eva there also awake and not sleeping.
Mother and daughter begin an impassioned rediscovery and clarification of their past relationship. Eva's husband overhears this unexpectedly heightened exchange, but wisely decides not to participate and interfere. Hearing this impassioned exchange, her disabled younger sister painfully forces herself out of her bed and starts crawling up to the stairs to where Eva and Charlotte are arguing. Upon reaching the landing she starts shouting, "Mama, come!"
In the morning Charlotte prepares for her departure. Eva goes to the grave of her departed son, and her husband ineffectively tries to soothe her ailing sister. Charlotte asks for a friend to escort her away by train. While speaking to her friend on the train, she begins to question the unfortunate fate of her disabled and paralyzed daughter, asking the unanswerable questions: "Why couldn't she die? ...." Her older daughter sends her mother a letter starting with the words: "I realize that I wronged you." The mother reads the letter in which her daughter, in its conclusion, leaves open the possibility of a future reconciliation as the film ends.

Tags: bleak, suspenseful, claustrophobic, flashback

Review:
Writer/director Ingmar Bergman examines the strained relationship between a mother and daughter in `Autumn Sonata,' starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann.
Eva (Ullmann) has not seen her mother, Charlotte (Bergman) in seven years; a successful concert pianist, Charlotte has spent a good portion of her life on the road, but after losing her long-time companion, Leonardo, Eva invites her to come to the parsonage where she and her minister husband, Viktor (Halvar Bjork), live, for an extended visit.
Charlotte accepts, but soon after her arrival, old wounds and feelings begin to surface, and the film becomes an intimate character study of the life-long dysfunctional relationship between Charlotte and Eva, during which director Bergman intricately examines the causes and effects of all that has passed between them during their lives.
And, as good as Ullmann's performance here is, it is equaled-- though not, I would say-- surpassed, by Ingrid Bergman's portrayal (in her final theatrical appearance) of Charlotte; and in a renewal of faith that there is some justice in the world after all, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for it.
An intelligent, thought provoking and emotionally wrenching film, highlighted by outstanding performances and beautifully photographed by Sven Nykvist, `Autumn Sonata' is an example of filmmaking at it's best; it's a lasting tribute, not only to the immense talents of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, but to Ingrid Bergman, one of the most beautiful and gifted actresses ever to grace the silver screen.
The textures, the warm reds and the close-ups of the faces of wounded souls, all combine to make the viewer realize that s/he is witnessing High Art.Then there's the shot of  Liv Ullman's wounded profile as she stares at her mother, Ingrid Bergman, while mother shows Liv how the Chopin piece should be played.
This is one of the very best Ingmar Bergman films I have seen, and therefore one of the very best films.Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman are simply amazing together as a mother and daughter combination from hell.
Ingrid Bergman, in what is doubtlessly the finest performance of her career, portrays a mother who has neglected her children all her life and is confronted by this fact by her grown daughter whose adoration as a child has turned into an apparently irreversible hatred.
It is considered to be Ingrid Bergman's film and she is phenomenal as a talented and world renowned pianist who had never been a good mother to her two daughters.
The tension between mother and daughter is building up, at first it is jolly but soon we see cracks in the surface of both Ingrid Bergman's glamorous Charlotte and Liv Ullman's quiet and suppressed Eva."Höstsonaten" is beautiful, but it takes its toll on the viewer.
in this film, however, all control of imaging was in the hands of her swedish counterparts ingmar bergman and sven nykvist, and the image they created of her was deconstructive of her screen persona, yet not in her brilliance and ability as an actress.ingrid hated working with them, though.
she returns to visit after 7 years, and that's when the sparks fly.liv ullman, who plays eva, (the married daughter), has usually  been portayed as a non-confrontational person in her collaborations with ingmar, yet her persona in this film is slightly reserved in the beginning, but all her inhibitions are unleashed upon charlotte.
Ingrid plays Charlotte, a concert pianist who has, upon the recent death of her longtime lover, Leonardo, returned to her native land to visit her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann), whom she hasn't seen for seven years, and her husband Viktor (Halvar Bjork), who is a minister.
After a bit one begins to feel sorry for Charlotte, despite her failures as a mother, to have a daughter so unforgiving and so hateful.Liv Ullmann is rather startling in this portrayal, with her penetrating eyes, her hard, Neandethalish forehead, the severe specs, and the uncompromising tone of her voice.
The viewer is left to decide.Perhaps the best scene in the film is the one that follows dinner the night of Charlotte's arrival in which Eva plays the piano, a Chopin prelude.
When Eva turns to stare at her mother, who is, of course, playing brilliantly with great finesse and touch, the expression on Eva's face, held for many long seconds, is unforgettable.Not to second guess the master, but I would have liked to have seen the entire movie played in this, a more subtle key than that which followed.
However when it comes to dysfunction and disease, Ingmar Bergman is unrestrained.Ingrid Bergman was nominated for an academy award for best actress in this, her last feature film (she had already been diagnosed with cancer), but lost out to Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978).(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!).
I count it as some of Ingmar Bergman's best writing.Eva plays for her professional pianist mother Charlotte one of Chopin's preludes she had been practicing for some time.
Ingrid Bergman as Charlotte, is a concert pianist visiting her daughter Eva, played by Liv Ullmann.
I thought this especially so in the flashback sequences, and in the scene close to the end of the film when Eva is in the cemetery.Although not as perfect as The Seventh Seal, or Wild Strawberries, Autumn Sonata still has much to say, whether we feel comfortable listening to it or not..
Cross Ingmar Bergman, (undoubtedly known to most as Sweden's greatest film director), with a performance as great as any from Ingrid Bergman's career,(most critics call her the greatest Actress to come from Sweden); and what does one get, MAGIC on screen.
At least part of that is because it is in color, and I think Ingmar Bergman's finest work was done in black and white.This was Ingrid Bergman's last performance in a major theatrical feature film, and it is great to see her under such strong direction, even if this is not regarded as her best role.
Typical introspective Bergman film with exceptional performances by Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman.The latter plays a famous concert pianist visiting her daughter after a long absence.
There is lots of voice over narration, lots of flashbacks, lots of static dialogue, and lots of static monologue (sometimes with the character talking directly to the camera.) The on focus mother-daughter relationship is sad in itself but the overall gloom is layered on pretty thick - loss of parent, loss of husband, loss of child, bad parenting, absentee parenting, repressed anger, forced abortion, disabled child, spastic cerebral palsy, disgust, hatred, emotional detachment and so on......This is the perfect movie to watch if you're a psychoanalyst but for the casual viewer it's pretty depressing stuff.
I recognized many of the tumultuous emotions in the two women at the heart of this story; one particular scene, where Liv Ullmann stares off into space as domineering mother Ingrid Bergman plays the piano, is shiveringly real.
Despite fine acting by all the four principal actors and an appropriately emotive 'autumny' look and feel to the cinematography, the scripting is very dated in a bad way - labored and patronizing to the viewer.It's supposedly believable and relatively straight-forward absent-parent-isolated-child-now-both-adults premise has been very heavy-handedly weighted down by an unnecessarily overwrought script filled with dialogue that borders on the paranoid - an unintended outcome from an over earnestness on the writer-director's part, who doesn't seem to believe subtlety is a virtue in the effective conveyance of a family drama.As it is, the movie has unfortunately caricatured and locked itself into a time-style warp that doesn't lend it the relevance and timelessness of better constructed movies.
While some have put more credit to the late Ingrid for her role as Charlotte the absentee piano master mother, and she does deserve as much credit here as she does for her more well-known work from the 40s, Ullmann as usual connects so strongly and passionately with the material that it could rank as one of her very best in her collaboration with Mr. Bergman.
Then, in the middle of the night, the confrontation- and really confessional- from daughter to mother comes out, and it is really the kind of despairingly, bitter but completely honest drama that could only be palatable from this director, from these actors who believe in the characters this much.While there are many a sad, crushing moment in these twenty to thirty minutes of this hidden, terrible lot of anguish from the daughter to the stunned and crushed mother, maybe my favorite scene of the film is also one of the subtler ones and tells a great deal about their relationship.
The story of a worldly pianist (Ingrid Bergman in her final film role) who returns home to her two daughters upon the death of her partner, the owlish writer Eva and the handicapped Lena.
Finally, as both mother and daughter are stripped down of their armor, we only see two humans desperately wanting love but impotent to do act upon it.Ingmar Bergman's handle over his actors wasn't out of the norm, but it's still exhilarating to experience the performances he gets out of them.
Charlotte Andergast (Bergman) is a renowned pianist who recently lost her companion Leonardo (Løkkeberg), so she accepts the invitation to stay with her eldest daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Viktor (Björk) for some time, whom she hasn't seen for seven years.This highly nerve-wracking chamber drama begins with Viktor's breaking-the-fourth-wall monologue about him and Eva's temporal life, he is a minister and how they are united under the guidance of the parish work.
The bond between a mother and a daughter often comes off as an amalgam of love and hatred, AUTUMN SONATA is at its best to dissect the relationship in dialectics, there is no right or wrong in the story, firstly, viewers is prone to cold-shoulder Charlotte's self-seeking pretentiousness, her failure in motherhood, but, when Eva's anger is fully emancipated, her one-sided blame- shooting accusation is also defectively biased, Ingmar Bergman is a true maestro in concocting this kind of brutal revelation of human being's deep-rooted character deficiency, it is not a parable, it is just a real life situation may occur to many others, unfortunately this time one might also sense a tint of misogyny.
This film is in a deep way a very complicated film, because the relationship between the mother (Ingrid Bergman) and her daughter (Liv Ullman)is in a strange way unaceptibel.
Returning home forces her and her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) to reconcile while at the same time facing problems that their family has had.Film buffs know that Ingmar Bergman is one director who doesn't insult his audience's intelligence.
As in the scene where Eva (Liv Ullman) plays a few notes on the piano for her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a magisterial and anthological moment, in the force and expressiveness of two actresses who say nothing on the scene but suggest a universe Of rivalries, misunderstandings and anguish in a (non) relation of mother and daughter.Autumn Sonata "is a tragic burden of human emotion, and is mostly a drama of confessions between two women, who dialogue with each other, which ends up generating a certain monotonous production noise, especially by the subtle clash of the Seem to dominate much of the film, which may have been elaborated in an attempt to generate a frenzy in the audience for the climax, which is not necessary or even does not work, because in the invitation letter written by Eva and In the opening monologue performed by Eva's husband, it is already clear that there, it will be a place to settle accounts.In addition to its musical allusion, the film's title keeps track of another central point: the idea of ​​ seasons and cycles.
Ingmar Bergman's 1978 film HÖSTSONATEN (Autumn Sonata) portrays the troubled relationship between a distant mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) and her wounded daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann).
The mother is a great concert pianist, poised, self-assured and frostier than any ice maiden and she is played by Ingrid Bergman, working with the director for the first time and giving a magnificent performance.
The daughter is the mousy, timorous wife of a vicar until one extraordinary night she roars and pours out all the bile she has inside her and she is played superbly by Liv Ullmann.To say that the characters in Bergman's films don't speak or act the way 'real' people do is like saying Shakespeare's characters don't behave like people do in 'real' situations.
***SPOILERS*** It's the autumn of her life as famed concert pianist Charlotte Andergast, Ingrid Bergman, decides to patch things up with her estranged daughter Eve, Liv Ullmann, whom she hasn't seen in seven years.
I found quite charming the fact that the colors in the movie are all autumnal, which fits the title perfectly.After the death of her long time friend and partner, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) accepts the invitation of her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Viktor (Halvar Björk) to come and stay with them a while.
Charlotte hasn't seen Eva in years because she's always touring, as she's a world famous pianist, and after the joy of seeing each other wears off, one night the two women start recalling Eva's childhood and, in a heated fight, manage to finally tell each other what they always wanted to say.Autumn Sonata deals with the negative consequences on a child's later life, caused by the fact that a parent is too concentrated on his/her career and therefore is ignoring his/her child.
But I think it's very difficult not to get emotionally involved in the story, especially since relationships between parents and children are rarely simple.Because of so much dialogue and because it is mostly set in Eva's house, Autumn Sonata reminds of theatre, which is where Bergman started his career.
It tells the story about Charlotte Andergast, a world renowned concert pianist who after seven years abroad visits her daughter Eva who lives on the countryside with her husband Victor who is a preacher and her multi-disabled sister Helena who Eva brought home from the institution her mother had placed her in after abandoning them to pursue her career.Distinctly and precisely directed by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, this condensed and finely paced psychological character-piece draws an incisive portrayal of a materialistic artist's afflicting relationship with the daughter she has neglected for many years and her struggle to redeem herself and gain her religious daughter's forgiveness.
While notable for it's naturalistic milieu depictions, prominent set design by production designer Anna Asp, cinematography by cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006), costume design by Swedish costume designer Inger Pehrsson and use of music, this dialog-driven, existentialistic and humane chamber-piece depicts two converging and deeply internal studies of character.This atmospheric, straightforward and concentrated story about a heart- to-heart conversation during one autumn night between a reunited daughter and mother, is impelled and reinforced by it's emotional depth, substantial character-development, riveting dialog, cogent narrative structure, the profound acting performances by Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) in her next to last acting role and the fine supporting acting performances by Swedish actor Halvar Björk (1928-2000) and Swedish actress Lena Nyman (1944-2011).
Ingmar Bergman here studies the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, and it's something that many of us can relate to.The lovely Eva (Ullmann), here a plain parson's wife, invites her recently widowed (perhaps by a second husband) mother Charlotte (Bergman) to visit.
Autumn Sonata (1978) *** (out of 4) Ingmar Bergman's (shock) depressing tale of a mother (Ingrid Bergman) trying to come to terms with her two daughters, one (Liv Ullmann) who has a strong hatred towards the mother.
The movie reaches its apex when, in a typical Ingmar Bergman moment, Ingrid is forced with facing the music as the daughter lays the blame on her for everything that she has had to deal with during her life.
Ingrid Bergman plays an older woman who has spent most of her life traveling as a concert pianist--leaving her 2 daughters and husband at home most all the time.
Yet, the ambiguity of the film relies on this strange impression that each character plays against the words, as said Liv Ullman in an interview, one of the first disagreement in Bergman's careers was when Ingrid refused to say 'hold me' after getting so many insults, when her instinctive reaction would've been to slap her daughter in the face, and being a woman, she probably knew better than Ingmar in that department.And indeed, she says 'hold me', but her eyes keep a dignity, while the real slap in the face is that masterpiece of austere realism, but even more poignant and heart-breaking as I dare anyone not to relate to it.
The whole film basically revolves around the tensions between a famous pianist, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), and her visit to her emotionally fragile and bitter eldest daughter Eva (Liv Ullman), a four-eyed frump, who lives with her pastor husband in a vicarage.
It focuses more on character interrelations and human emotions then is usual for Bergman, with less symbolism and existential truths than his other, more famous works, but still rings painfully true.The structure is quite simple, a mother (Charlotte, played perfectly by Ingmar Bergman in her only Bergman role) comes to visit her daughter (Eva, played by Liv Ullman) after seven years, and they spend a few days at the house with Liv Ullman's husband and mentally handicapped sister.
Autumn Sonata is a gem of a film from renowned Swedish director Ingmar Bergman which centers around the complicated and difficult relationship of a famous pianist, Charlotte and her eldest daughter, Eva, portrayed by stalwarts Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann respectively.Autumn Sonata begins with the pianist mother Charlotte visiting Eva and her husband.
Gradually, as the film unfolds, several dimensions to this relation gets revealed -Charlotte's career, Eva's childhood, the presence of a second daughter among others.Autumn Sonata's most enduring memory is its crescendo involving the two brilliant actors Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann.
Liv Ullman plays Eva, the shy and reclusive daughter of famous, narcissistic concert pianist Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman).