Ingmar Bergman’s almost fated 1978 filmic teaming with Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten), is amongst the very best of the films in his canon. It is also the most emotionally intense of the series of Strindbergian or Chekhovian chamber dramas he has filmed over the years, which includes his Spider Trilogy (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) and such other films as Cries And Whispers.
That said, it is perhaps the simplest film that Bergman ever directed, even simpler in plot than The Silence. It was filmed in Norway whilst Bergman was in his self-imposed exile from Sweden over trumped up tax evasion charges, and backed with British and American money. Ingrid Bergman, meanwhile, had just been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her a few years later, and this was her last acting role for film, although she did a final television movie portraying Golda Meier.
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. Bergman always seems his best when two female leads are front and center. He may be the best director of actresses in cinema history, and certainly the best writer for them.
Eva could never forgive her mother’s absences from her life, nor her infidelities to her dead father, Josef (Erland Josephson), who is seen only in wordless flashbacks, as Liv Ullmann’s daughter with Ingmar Bergman, Linn Ullmann, plays the young Eva. As much of this film seems to mirror Ingrid Bergman’s own personal life, when she abandoned her husband and daughter to gallivant around Europe with her filmmaker boyfriend, Roberto Rossellini, the film caused quite a stir when it was released.
Many critics have commented on the similarities the film has with Woody Allen’s own Bergmanian drama, Interiors, released in the same year, which it does have; but a better analogue would be the drama he released almost a decade later, September, which was also about the strife between a mother and daughter, who also had a shocking secret -- in the later film’s case a very Lana Turnerian murder cover-up.
Initially, it seems that the ‘bad guy’ in the film is Charlotte, who is obsessed with her career, making money, as she talks in English with her agent Paul (Gunnar Björnstrand), and the death of her latest lover, Leonardo (Georg Løkkeberg). She not only ignores Eva’s emotional needs, but those of her youngest daughter Helena (Lena Nyman), a spastic with a debilitating degenerative condition that drives Charlotte to avoid her progeny for seven full years. But by film’s end we see what a bitter, self-centered, and hypocritical person Eva really is, and the viewer is not allowed any easy answers as to the fictive ‘reality’ behind this familial strife.
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