Höstsonaten

Ingmar Bergman (1978)

Charlotte, a famous pianist, is persuaded by her elder daughter, Eva, to come to stay (they’ve not seen each other for seven years).  When she arrives at the country parsonage where Eva lives with her pastor husband, Viktor, and her grievously disabled younger sister, Helena, Charlotte gets out of the car to be greeted by Eva, walks upstairs to her room, sits on the bed and launches immediately into an account of the last hours of Leonardo, her partner of some years (and whose death has prompted Eva’s invitation).  Charlotte’s had a long journey and is suffering from back pain but Eva doesn’t ask her mother if she’d like to eat or drink or wants to freshen up or rest for a while.  We can already see that Charlotte is a whirlwind personality but you get the feeling that it’s Ingmar Bergman, rather than she, who can’t be bothered with social detail and wants to cut to the psychoanalytical chase.  Autumn Sonata is entirely about a mother’s relationship with her daughters.  The women are independent beings to the extent that there are no men in their lives to blame.  (There’s a suggestion, not substantiated, that Charlotte herself suffered at the hands of her own mother before she had children of her own to punish.)

There isn’t a male character of any substance or authority in the film.  Viktor loves Eva (without, he tells us in an opening speech to camera, being able to express his love in words to her) but accepts that she doesn’t love him.  Eva tells us that her late father, Josef, seen briefly and silently in flashbacks, was doubly betrayed by Charlotte:  she had affairs with other men and she subjugated her marriage, like her children, to her musical career.   Leonardo is seen also in flashbacks, on his deathbed.  Charlotte’s agent Paul is at the other end of a phone line at one stage but we don’t see or hear his voice.  Little more than a day after arrival, Charlotte takes her leave of Eva’s household;   there’s then a short scene of her on a train with Paul – but he remains silent.  (Gunnar Björnstrand is expressive even without words – it may be that Bergman wanted him to do the part of Paul and the silence was connected with Björnstrand’s increasing ill health.  Even so, the mute performance fits with the neutralising of the men in the story.)  And Eva’s son Erik, who we’re told transformed her life and marriage temporarily, drowned shortly before his fourth birthday.  He’s a collection of photographs and an unaltered bedroom at the family home.

The heart of the film is a middle-of-the-night dialogue between Charlotte, wakened by a bad dream (a brilliant, frightening sequence), and Eva, who’s had a drink to summon up the courage to express the resentment she feels towards Charlotte for being a selfish, neglectful mother.  The transformation of the graceless, eager to please Eva into the implacable accuser of the vivacious, bossy Charlotte is anticipated by occasional sharp remarks made by Eva earlier on – although these remarks are delivered (to disconcerting effect) without Eva’s changing expression or the tone of her voice.  (These may be either subtle foreshadowings of the onslaught to come or another example of Bergman’s impatience to get to the meat course.)    Although Autumn Sonata is ostensibly about two (or three) women, its fundamental weakness – because Bergman sets up the situation as a virtual two-hander – is that Charlotte is really the only character.  It’s much more Wild Strawberries than Persona:  Charlotte, like Professor Borg, comes under pressure to review her life and behaviour (and proves to have a greater facility than Borg for self-serving evasion).  Ingmar Bergman supplies the character of Charlotte – rattling on about her successes in the concert hall and the bedroom, about clothes and Swiss chocolate, greedy even in the number of sleeping pills she gulps down but eventually turning off the light after a comforting look at her bank accounts – with the material of a life.  What’s good about her nightmare – as well as the utterly convincing oneiric texture and movement of the images that Bergman and Sven Nykvist create – is that you can read the grasping hand that threatens Charlotte in more than one way – either death or her needful daughters (or both) clutching at her.  Eva is conceived as the miserably unalterable deliverer of home truths and the part is underwritten in terms of individualising her.  Even allowing for the fact that Charlotte spends most of her time in a milieu that’s opulent, sophisticated and metropolitan, whereas Eva lives simply out in the sticks, the characterising details aren’t fairly distributed between them.  Eva doesn’t speak or move or give a look without seeming to express the psychologically crippling effects of her mother’s tyranny.  The role of the bedridden Helena – suffering from a disease that’s unspecified except that we’re told it gets worse and she’s unable to communicate with anyone except her sister – is a garish (verging on tasteless) complement to the same idea.

Eva’s lengthy recital of her grievances isn’t illuminating.  It’s already clear what sort of person Charlotte is and Eva’s attack doesn’t reveal anything different about either herself or her mother.  The only difference is that the worm has turned:  Eva inveighs and Charlotte listens (or hears what Eva says) and doesn’t argue.  There’s no good reason – except that Bergman thinks that Charlotte deserves her comeuppance – for her reacting so submissively.    The BFI note describes, in his own words, how the idea of Autumn Sonata came to Ingmar Bergman.  He decided, sur le champ, that he wanted to do a story about a mother and daughter and that they had to be played by Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann respectively.  Given the way the film is, this rings completely true but Ingmar Bergman’s (over-?) familiarity with parent-child psychodrama and his admiration for the two actresses are not enough to make the piece successful.   His enthusiasm for the two leads is more deeply felt than his writing, which is mostly thin and artificial – and the fact that he wrote a good part for Ingrid Bergman says more, I think, about what he felt about having her in the film than about his engagement with the character she’s playing.  He fudges an important aspect of Charlotte’s personality.  In a charged scene, Eva – at her mother’s request – plays a Chopin étude badly then watches in glum fury as Charlotte explains and demonstrates how it should be done.   Ingrid Bergman has an ineffable light in her eyes as Charlotte listens to Eva play – she’s stimulated by her daughter’s ineptness.  The moment is gripping in suggesting that Charlotte is far from uncaring – that she’s more malicious than that – but this isn’t properly followed through.  (There are minor things that seem careless too:  Charlotte hasn’t been in the house for seven years but appears to know where Helena’s bedroom is – even though Helena was brought to the parsonage by Eva, from some kind of nursing home, only two years previously.)  The only aspect of the story that I found really believable in psychological terms was that, once Charlotte has departed, Eva begins to recant and to look forward to her mother’s next visit.

Because this was their only screen collaboration, Ingmar Bergman clearly saw working with Ingrid Bergman as a special occasion and a treat – and she repays the compliment.  When Viktor talks to camera to tell us how he feels about Eva, it seems an unimaginative theatrical device.   When Charlotte, alone in her room and preparing to dress for dinner (in bright red), talks to herself, it’s more or less credible that this is her usual behaviour – what she says tells us more about Charlotte at the same time.  The same is true when she’s in bed, addressing a photograph of her dead lover.  Bergman switches on a smiling, caring façade going into Helena’s room.  This seems completely right – especially because the mask isn’t as convincing to Helena as Charlotte thinks it is but Charlotte doesn’t see that.  The phone call to Paul is a bit overdone (remarkable thing about language:  even an artist of Ingmar Bergman’s stature seems to miss this because Charlotte’s monologue is in English) but Ingrid Bergman’s palpable love of acting and her vivid wit in all these scenes are infectious – and watching her means even more in retrospect because this turned out to be her last major cinema role.   Her performance is richly enjoyable, too enjoyable for the film’s good:  it’s difficult to dislike Charlotte, especially when Eva is the way she is.  Liv Ullmann is on a hiding to nothing here.  Perhaps because, at the time Autumn Sonata was made, she was an almost permanent fixture in Ingmar Bergman pictures, he seems to take her for granted – and the effect of Ullmann bringing her powerful resources to bear on the inert, monotonous Eva is almost grotesque.  Eva is put in the shade by Charlotte both psychically and physically but Ullmann is not an insignificant presence and her approach to the role makes matters worse.  It’s as if she is engaging so strongly with what’s going on inside Eva that she externalises it and every outward quality of the woman becomes too insistent.  She is simpering, self-effacing and awkward – but intensely so.   Although the role is a wretched idea, Lena Nyman gives a fine performance as Helena.   Halvar Bjork is Viktor and Erland Josephson is Josef.

28 January 2009