You have to battle your way through it and emerge triumphant. Total restraint the whole time… The prelude must be made to sound almost ugly. Then a short relief… but it evaporates at once, and the pain is the same.
“Chopin was emotional, but not sentimental. The way she speaks of music, it might as well be a form of self-punishment, proving her wilful endurance against the temptation to connect with her audiences. Instead, her only remark is an aloof correction of her stylistic interpretation, and a far more refined demonstration of how the piece should be played instead. Though her face breaks into soft tenderness while listening to her daughter play the piano, this is not something she can express verbally.
Quite significantly, this coldness extends to her music as well. Autumn Sonata marks her final film performance before she would pass away four years later, but even so she makes every minute onscreen count, embodying a severe repression that holds back any displays of maternal affection. Maybe this is also why he finally resolved to collaborate with the last truly great Swedish actress of the era that his path had not crossed yet, Ingrid Bergman. As such, Autumn Sonata is located near the edge of his sharp artistic decline, reflecting Bergman’s concerns of old age and mortal regrets in its central mother figure. At this point he still had a couple more decades of filmmaking ahead of him, including one of his greatest accomplishments in Fanny and Alexander, but the large bulk of his work from the 1980s onward would largely be in television productions that inhibited his creative freedom. The earthy, autumnal colours of Bergman’s exteriors seep indoors, grounding his film in the season of harvests.īesides the symbolism of growth and harvest that Ingmar Bergman attaches to Autumn Sonata, it is fitting that this is the season he left until last as a figurative representation of his career, having previously used Spring, Summer, and Winter in cinematic illustrations of life’s cycles. Now with Charlotte suddenly visiting their home after many years of silence though, the time has come for her to reap the seeds of misery she has sown – not merely neglecting the wellbeing of her daughters, but wholly sabotaging their attempts to lead happy lives. With a childless void left in Eva’s life, and Helena feeling the absence of her mother, a surrogate relationship has formed between the two that cuts Charlotte out altogether, seeing one sister become the other’s caretaker. In the grand scheme of things though, it is the accumulation of subtle, cruel acts which have left the deepest psychological imprints. So too does she blame her mother’s abandonment for indirectly causing Helena’s severe disability, leaving her paralysed and unable to speak. Is that true? Is the daughter’s misfortune the mother’s triumph? Is my grief your secret pleasure?” Shared habits carrying across generations of women in a single shot – brilliant acting from both Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman, but also an excellent framing of their faces.įor Eva, this grief most prominently manifested in the form of an abortion forced on her at age 18, introducing her to the profound trauma of losing a child that would strike her again many years later in the death of her four-year-old son Erik. It’s as if the umbilical cord had never been cut. The mother’s unhappiness will be the daughter’s unhappiness. The mother’s failures are paid for by the daughter. “The mother’s injuries are handed down to the daughter.
Bergman’s framing of them as echoes of each other represents just as much too, as both habitually grasp at their faces in close-up while Eva levels biting accusations at her mother.
All at once, the insecurity which haunts Charlotte’s mind simultaneously turns them into similarly flawed copies, and ensures that their successes may never exceed her own. Perhaps she has wanted to see them succeed in similar fields, letting them enter the world as even more refined versions of herself, though now with a more mature mind and decades’ worth of hindsight, this does not seem the case to Eva. For the entirety of her daughters’ childhoods, Charlotte has been dedicated to her career as a classical pianist, and held both Eva and Helena to standards as rigorous as those she imposes on herself. True to Ingmar Bergman’s seasonal metaphors drawn through so many of his films, Autumn Sonata oversees a harvest of the emotional kind unfold in the twilight years of one mother’s life.
0 kommentar(er)
