Autumn Sonata

As a tour de force of screen acting, Autumn Sonata stands unchallenged as the finest work of Ingmar Bergman’s last few years as a movie director. Fanny and Alexander may have won the Oscars, but Autumn Sonata represents Bergman’s chamber cinema at its exquisite peak. The “dream team” pairing of Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann adds a searing, ultimately poignant quality to the film’s psychological struggle between mother and daughter.

Shot in Norway, with British and American backing, and featuring Swedish dialogue, Autumn Sonata emerged from one of the darkest spells in Ingmar Bergman’s life. In 1976 he had gone into voluntary exile in Munich after being accused of evading tax on the income from certain films. The charges proved false, and Bergman eventually returned to his native Sweden to make Fanny and Alexander. But between 1976 and 1980 his films reflect the anguish—and anger—provoked by this experience. The Serpent’s Egg and From the Life of the Marionettes, the two other pictures from this period, flopped unceremoniously.

Autumn Sonata was filmed in the fall of 1977 and released late the following year, when it earned a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. It marks the swan song of Ingrid Bergman’s career, fulfilled her long-held desire to make a film with her namesake, and was her first film in Swedish in eleven years. Once an immensely popular star, Ingrid had become the butt of stage critics and gossip columnists alike in the intervening years. The waspish Stig Ahlgren, writing in Vecko-Journalen during the 1950s after seeing her in the oratorio Saint Joan, had dismissed her as “not being an actress in the official sense. Her career has been enacted on quite a different level . . . Ingrid Bergman is merchandise, offered on the open market. She charges and is paid according to current prices, just like herring and crude iron.”

Ingrid Bergman reacted with such shock on a first reading of the Autumn Sonata screenplay, in which the director described her character as a self-centered concert pianist who had neglected her children in favor of her profession. After initial clashes during the rehearsal period, however, she buckled down to her task, sensing perhaps a parallel with her own life, when she had abandoned her family in America in order to pursue a bohemian life with Italian director Roberto Rossellini in the late 1940s. Her performance as Charlotte, the mother, exudes such candor and pain that by the end of Autumn Sonata, we find our sympathies oscillating uncertainly between her and Eva, her daughter (played by Liv Ullmann).

For inspiration, Ingmar Bergman delved frequently and effectively into his childhood memories. It’s no accident that Autumn Sonata takes place in a country parsonage, similar to the one Ingmar’s parent’s had in a small mining community north of Stockholm when Pastor Erik Bergman was starting his distinguished career in the church. Eva’s handicapped sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), serves as a symbol of the repressed and distorted personality Bergman believed himself to suffer from as a consequence of his forbidding childhood. His own mother embodied for Bergman the essential clash between motherhood and professional career. Amid the incessant wrangling of Autumn Sonata this becomes a question of art versus family, with Bergman’s feelings audible through the lines of both Eva and Charlotte.

Music performs a compelling role in this magnificent film. Chopin’s Prelude no. 2 in A Minor, played first by Eva, then by Charlotte, communicates the purity and clarity of Bergman’s own vision—containing such a controlled filigree of pain. Later, a Bach cello suite underscores a moment of sadness in the early life of Helena.

Sven Nykvist’s glowing color photography provides the film with a visual warmth and intensity denied to some of Bergman’s older black-and-white voyages through the soul, while the underrated actor Halvar Björk contributes an intriguing portrayal of Viktor, Eva’s husband.

The film takes the form of a sonata itself, with the resounding central movement filled with sound and fury worthy of Beethoven, as Eva and Charlotte spend a long night releasing their pride and prejudice, their bitterness and regret. By morning, their fury quenched, each has arrived at a degree of tolerance, and at a recognition of the common bonds that tie one to the other. Bergman once said, “We go away from our parents in youth and then we gradually come back to them; and in that moment, we have grown up.” Autumn Sonata is the consummate illustration of that thought.

Peter Cowie has written several books on Scandinavian film, including Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography and the recent Straight from the Heart: Modern Norwegian Cinema, 1971-1999.