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 Bergman's life. In 1976 he had gone into voluntary exile in Munich after to make a film with Ingrid Bergman. It was also her first film in Swedish in eleven years. Once an immensely popular star in the 1930s, Ingrid Bergman 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 shock on a first reading of the screenplay, in which the director described her as a self-centered concert pianist who had neglected her children in favour of her profession, with its prosperity and its glamorous trips abroad. 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 Live Ullmann's Eva. "in the film there were many women oeprating in different jobs," recalls Ingmar Bergman, "and I think--possibly for the first time during the making of a film--she had this sister-relationship with those girls, particularly with Liv, and that, too, added to her emotional security."

For inspiration, Bergman has delved frequently and effectively into his childhood memories. It's no accident that Autumn Sonata should take place in a country parsonage, similar to the one Ingmar's parents had in a small mining community north of Stockhom 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 aconsequenmce 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. The A minor Prelude by Chopin, played after dinner in the vicarage first by Eva, haltingly, and then by an assured Charlotte, communicates the purity and clarity of Bergman's own vision--containing as it does such a controlled filigree of pain. Much later, a Bach cello sonata underscores a moment of sadness in the earlier 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 tkaes the form of a sonata itself, with the resounding central movement filled with Beethovenian sound and fury, 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 comsummate illustration of that thought.
-- Peter Cowie

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