By Farran Smith Nehme
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Issac
Source: Criterion (September 16, 2013)
The film Autumn Sonata (1978) dreads deep into a woman's heart, even if she backs down from it. Whether we are cherished or abandoned, spoiled or abused, we are all daughters of our own mothers.
The two main actors of the film "Autumn Sonata", Liv Uman and Ingrid Bergman, both have daughters of their own and prestigious careers. But when Ingrid Bergman left her husband for Roberto Rossellini, she hadn't seen the daughter born to her first marriage in years.
Autumn Sonata
As for Liv Uman, just the year before, she wrote: "My professional success and my efforts to try to write a book cannot make up for the obvious shortcomings in my family." She was referring to her relationship with her daughter, Lin Uman, whose father was Ingmar Bergman. The director later said that when he conceived the Autumn Sonata, he did not consider other actresses to play the two main roles. He didn't say why, and there was no need to say.
Sven Nikowest's photography is like an unforgettable palette, as the film's name, The Autumn Sonata, suggests.
Using Bergman's signature close-up technique, The Autumn Sonata tells the story of daughter Eva (Liv Uman) who invites her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) in a small, almost claustrophobic set. Charlotte was a famous pianist who had a fascinating life but had not visited her daughter for seven years.
During that time, Eva marries the priest Victor (Halvad Björk); they have a son, Eric, who drowns before his fourth birthday; she has been taking care of her sister Helena (Lena Nieman), who is slowly and horribly approaching death due to a degenerative disease. Mother Charlotte came, and she was as elated as ever, as if to think she had paid off the family's emotional debt. This is not the case.
Bergman meticulously observes how a daughter's anger after being battered has accumulated into a devastating all-night confrontation with her mother — during his self-exile from his native Sweden.
In 1976, Bergman, the country's most famous filmmaker, was arrested by the police for tax evasion. Five hours later, he was released, and the court dismissed the case, but the case was "disrespectful, disrespectful," a crime that violates the honor and dignity of monarchs such as grand dukes, kings, and emperors. It was beyond his reach.
From exile to the present, he has filmed Snake Egg (1977), but the response has been minimal. After filming the Autumn Sonata in Liv Uman's native Norway about 15 days later, he will also shoot The Puppet Career (1980) outside sweden. In retrospect, this part of his career seems to be both a long, slow transition from screen to stage and an exile.
"Puppet Career"
The close-up shots of The Autumn Sonata and the huge confrontation between mother and daughter seem to foreshadow the director's later interest in drama. It was also his last work to be made exclusively for film; from The Puppeteer's Career, Fanny and Alexander (1982) to Sarabund (2003) were all shot for television.
But the Autumn Sonata is also associated with Bergman's early seventies films. Before the tax evasion, he spent a decade making some of the best films of his career, and The Autumn Sonata represents a change in Bergman's other pinnacle works of that period, all of which focused on tragedies in intimate families—their preoccupation with physical and mental vulnerability, such as Shouting and Whispering (1972), which was full of mutual accusations of crimes committed by others, as well as scenes from Married Life (1973).
Married Life
In The Autumn Sonata, Bergman constructs his script with exposition. Every revelation of Charlotte is like another page of indictment.
For most of Eva's childhood, Charlotte has been traveling to keep Eva with her father (Erlan Josephson); Charlotte has an affair that causes her to leave her husband and children for up to 8 months (in flashbacks, the childhood Eva is played by Lin Uman). Not only did she leave Eva and her son-in-law alone, but Charlotte also didn't show up when Eva was pregnant or one of her grandchildren was born ("I'm recording all of Mozart's sonatas." I don't have a single day free." She reminded Victor).
Apparently, Charlotte hadn't come even after Eric's death, though no one bothered to throw it at her. There are too many other options Charlotte can make, like leaving Helena in this home and never seeing her again.
Charlotte's damage in a not very long life is enough to fill a miniseries. In fact, such storylines are repeated in classic Hollywood melodrama, where the selfish mother is the worst kind of villain, like the parasitic Gladys Cooper in "Sails," nagging betty Davis into a healthless person, and finally like Uman in "Autumn Sonata" with wire glasses.
When watching The Autumn Sonata, the image of the mother in other films may start to pop into your mind: in The Big Lie, the pianist played by Mary Astor leaves the child with Betty Davis and then embarks on a world tour because (for no other plausible reason) she is a ruthless bitch; Betty Davis is now the bad mom in Mr. Sgeffington, abandoning her lovelorn husband and daughter in pursuit of flirtation, lunch and shopping; Lana Turner lit more cigarettes for showbiz friends than for her daughter in Spring Breeze and Autumn Rain (this was echoed by Charlotte in Autumn Sonata when she called her agent).
In discussing the staunchly anti-Hollywood Ingmar Bergman, the reference to these films seems to be Don Quixote. But these old studio works reflect attitudes that are not made by these directors, and that attitudes are even easier to cross borders than the film itself. In the Autumn Sonata, there are many essences of maternal melodrama, concentrated in the superimposed events of a few days, deepened by Bergman's ability to find causes in what people do.
Of course, when the director insisted on having Ingrid Bergman play the role of Charlotte, he also knew what he got. She played a Hollywood star, bringing the character memories of her past movies, as well as her public image.
The actress didn't play her mother at her peak in Hollywood — she had ruined her acting career by scandal before she grew old. But she understood that playing Charlotte meant exploiting her own options and memories of the numerous newspaper reports of the 1950s accusing her of not being a good mother.
There's another clever irony here that her director hardly notices — Ingrid Bergman's career as an American star began with her Swedish hit Film The Cold Night (1939). The pianist she plays is deeply in love with the married violinist played by Leslie Howard... She gave him up for his children.
"Cold Night Piano Pick"
She worked with her husband Roberto Rossellini on brilliant films (which seemed to impress Ingmar Bergman) and triumphed in Hollywood with the Academy Award for Best Actress, True or False Princess (1956).
But from the 1960s onwards, although Bergman won another Oscar (for 1974's Murder on the Orient Express, an interesting film, but she played a role she could easily play), Bergman focused on stage work, as the film was mostly unsuccessful attempts.
Murder on the Orient Express
Maybe that's why, in 1973, when Bergman was presiding over the jury in Cannes, she took the time to slip a note into Ingmar Bergman's pocket to remind him that when they last met, he said he would give her a role.
In Bergman on Cinema, Ingmar Bergman writes that after a period of accumulated pain that had temporarily made him lose his mind, he was able to come up with a nearly complete outline of the Autumn Sonata in one day, and that its primary difference from the finished film was that after a great quarrel between mother and daughter, in Bergman's original idea, it was "the daughter who brought new life to the mother" in Bergman's original idea. What this would look like on screen is an intriguing mystery, but it's also a problem that Bergman couldn't solve on his own, and he gave up on the idea.
There is no such mysterious scene in the Autumn Sonata, but it is not without its peculiarities. Bergman first breaks down the fourth wall, leaving Eva's husband Victor to tell the audience about his wife, whom we see writing calmly at her desk. Timid and mediocre, Liv Uman's beauty was overshadowed by the clothes and hair of a woman twice her age.
She looks gentle, but underneath her appearance she is thoughtful. Eva knew Charlotte was going to face what she wanted to avoid most: the past. If the film were a chamber music, as it is often said, it was played amid a buzzing sound coming from behind the stage, the vibrato of years of suppressed pain.
When Charlotte arrived, she took her matching luggage and wore a chic trouser suit and asked her daughter to help her carry her into the house. A lot had happened to Eva in the seven years since she had last seen her mother, but Charlotte would transfer it to herself in just a few words. Eva told the story of hosting a music night for her parish residents, while Charlotte hastened to mention that she had already given five school concerts, all of which were all very successful.
In this family, Charlotte is like an actress, but she has been acting well until Eva reveals that Helena is there. Charlotte then openly expressed her indignation; she had just escaped death, and her lover Leonardo had died after a long illness.
In the Autumn Sonata, as in Shouts and Whispers, moments of death are coiled around the house—in little Eric's photographs, in Helena's battered body. No wonder self-absorbed people like Charlotte flinch; the death of a child is the ultimate reminder to themselves. Still, Charlotte wasn't an "actor" for no reason. She made up her mind and forced herself to see Helena, and when she saw Helena, her charm was revealed again.
Helena, played by Lena Nieman, is interesting. She became famous for starring in the late 1960s film The Yellow of My Curiosity, which enshrined Sweden as the indulgent capital of the world, and as Helena, she was there to remind Charlotte of the cost of self-indulgence. The look on her face when she saw her mother was the most heartbreaking moment in the film—the sheer joy was so intense that it seemed to cause pain in her body.
Ingmar Bergman was a great artist who would not embark on the path of outright evil by implying that Charlotte was not affected.
Next, Charlotte paced the room alone, filled with unwanted emotions, calculating to end her daughter's visit early so she could avoid them. So far the holy and kind Eva has not sent some signs of resentment either. She ironically predicted to Victor that her mother would appear in widow's mourning clothes.
Instead, however, Charlotte walked in wearing a flowing red dress, and dinner was omitted one size fits all, better emphasizing the consequences of doing so. Eva shyly allowed herself to be persuaded to play Chopin's Prelude No. 2 in A minor. She played softly and hesitantly, as if missing notes everywhere. Bergman's shots stay on Charlotte, her face full of doting at first, and then gradually becoming more and more dissatisfied.
We expect the support of a mother, and Eva's desire for approval is so real that it seems that this eagerness is on the bench between them. But for Charlotte, it's hard for her to imagine that in a mediocre performance, Eva can do anything but try to improve. She told Eva that playing Chopin was about "feelings" rather than "sentimentality." People's unconditional praise for children's efforts seems to be entirely "sentimental".
As painful as this scene on the piano is, it's not entirely about the mother's callousness. Journalist Simon Hartstone writes that Ingmar Bergman "used to boast that he didn't know the age of his children, but he measured them by his own films, not by the age of his descendants." Throughout the film, Charlotte quotes works she plays before starting her own conference room—Mozart, Beethoven's First Symphony, and Bartolk Bello.
It's hard to say to what extent Bergman's own fatherly attitude is quoted in the film; a man who puts art above his own children is somehow considered normal while women aren't. Apparently, when Bergman repeatedly showed that Charlotte didn't know what mother meant, he was also making it clear that Eva didn't know what an artist was.
The gap between mother and daughter became a chasm later in the evening. When the argument began, Eva asked the simplest question: "Do you like me?" Here Uman's performance gained the greatest tension; her face twisted incredibly, like the face of a child, but she was so grief-stricken that the audience could not have laughed at her.
"When you have time, I'm just a doll you play with," Eva continued, and Charlotte protested; she felt guilty, and her work was painful, which made her life seem meaningless.
Here, people finally felt some genuine sympathy for Charlotte's wry smile. Eva was furious now, and Charlotte never seemed to be as humane as she had been when she confessed, "I've always been afraid of you... I'm afraid of your request."
Eva replied that she hadn't asked for it, but that was clearly not true. She turned to another experience, visiting her before Helena's condition worsened, when Charlotte and Leonardo fell in love with her mother's lover. (In Spring Wind and Autumn Rain, the same is true.) ）
Somehow, Eva thinks it's her mother's fault, though how could anyone believe that a mother's responsibility extends to sharing your man with your daughter? "Did I make Helena sick?" Charlotte asked. "Yes, I think so." Eva replied. It's unfair, childish logic, but then again, the whole conversation is a kind of decay for both mother and daughter.
When the scene finally ends, Charlotte asks Eva to hold her; we don't know if Eva does it or if they can reconcile. The film returns to the scene where Eva writes another letter to her mother, convinced that she has driven Charlotte away. Bergman writes, "Their hatred has become stronger."
"Autumn Sonata" is Ingrid Bergman's masterpiece in dramatic films; by the time she made the film, she was already suffering from cancer that would kill her. Charlotte, who she plays, ends up with emotional candor, but director Bergman and star Bergman clash fiercely during rehearsals. She said she had drawn every facial expression in the mirror and was "trapped in the 1940s." It was clear that she wanted anything that would soften Charlotte.
The actress pleaded for a joke or two in the film. She was told not to joke. (Aside from some of Charlotte's pale, hollow quips, The Autumn Sonata is indeed an area without jokes; the scenes in Married Life are arguably depictions of greater emotional hurt, with more laughs in Married Life than the Autumn Sonata.) Bergman and Bergman argue about whether Charlotte left the children for seven years, as Bergman wrote, or five years, as Bergman insisted—five years, she felt, was less harsh.
"So, to keep me quiet," Ingrid Bergman wrote in her memoirs, "Bergman edited with the material I said 'five years'—even though I noticed that in the finished film, it was still seven years." Bergman won the battle, and when the cameras filmed, he had already won the war. The finished film exposes not only a mother's mistakes, but also her grave fear of the mistakes she has made.
One actress once said to the director, "Ingmar, everyone you know is a monster." With Charlotte, Ingmar Bergman gets the fully human, ultimately tragic monster he wants.