The only calm and balanced person in the film is Eva’s husband, a much older vicar at a church named Viktor (Halvar Björk, who ironically, the DVD commentary by Bergman scholar Peter Cowie informs us, did much work as a Swedish porno star), who opens the film with a narration to the camera about his wife, a writer, and closes the film reading the letter his wife has written to her mother after she has driven her away, possibly for good. He is the only reliable narrator in the tale for we clearly see the mother and daughter tear at each other with justifications and accusations, which make up the body of the film, but which are written and acted so impeccably they seem wholly natural, and never truly stagy.
Helena, we learn, is not the only tragic victim in the family, although we do learn that she had an affair with her mother’s lover, Leonardo, a fact that Eva takes great pleasure in needling Charlotte with. But, when Charlotte went back on tour, Helena deteriorated rapidly from her disease, which is never named.
Bergman seems to be obsessed with not only the decay of the soul or mind, but with that of the body, as well. But, a greater tragedy struck Viktor and Eva, when their small, cute, blond son Erik drowned the day before his fourth birthday. Viktor suggests to Charlotte that her pregnancy with him, after being told she was infertile, changed Eva forever. Charlotte seems to have been oblivious to the very fact that she had a grandson, much less that he died so tragically. Yet, this loss haunts Eva all the more deeply because we later find out, when Eva and her mother argue, that Eva was forced to have an abortion as a teenager, by her mother. This is what resulted in Eva’s thinking she was infertile, and what made Erik’s loss even more personally catastrophic for Eva.
All of this then sets the main filmic drama on course. Eva tears into Charlotte, and basically dumps all her garbage at her mother’s door. Charlotte tries to explain herself, that as a woman and an artists she had extra demands, and that what may have seemed selfish was not, merely her way to cope in a world where the odds were so stacked against her.
But, Eva will have none of it. She has taken about to constructing a world for herself and no amount of reality is allowed to intrude. Helena has de facto taken her son’s place in need, and even though Eva even admits that she might be incapable of love, the only person who seems to be the innocent in this film is Viktor — a rarity, indeed, for usually men are the cause of ruin in Bergman’s films.
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