From the Shelf: Autumn Sonata (1978, Ingmar Bergman)
Acquired: Early in ‘08, used from an FYE.
Seen before? Once - May 20th, 2008.
True story: I put this film on last week after a long day at work, having not slept well for the previous few nights because of the vicious cold I had caught. So I was sick and exhausted, and I planned to merely watch the first half-hour or so of this before passing out. 90 minutes later, I’m still awake and glued to the TV, desperate to see how it all turns out even though I’d already seen this before. That’s the transfixing power of this bitter blast of Ingmar Bergman.
Thing is, I can’t imagine anyone else making this film - this is so typically Bergman that it skirts the edge of self-parody, or at least self-cannibalization. Yet it works beautifully, partly due to Ingmar’s prodigious facility for this sort of raw-nerve material and partly due to some terrific acting on the part of both Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman, both of whom are as good here as they’ve ever been. Ingrid plays a successful concert pianist who decides to jaunt over to her estranged daughter’s place after her longtime (male) companion dies, and thus the stage is set for a full complement of Bergmanesque agony.
It’s a film of precarious and volcanic emotion, where words are wielded like kitchen knives; this relationship seems dead before Ingrid arrives, and we’re just here to watch the body being buried. The visual scheme, all orange and brown and… well, autumnal, emphasizes this - Autumn Sonata is a film set in a season of dying, of things falling to pieces. Yet at the end, there’s the smallest glimmer of hope and forgiveness. Destruction leads to renewal.
I also liked Ingmar’s use of closeups and tight framing, using the camera eye as an expression of the trapped discomfort of Ingrid’s character. It’s a well-worn trick, but it works, dammit.
Up next: Bikers, blackmail, tits and tacos…
