Eva is so emotionally crippled she can only express love for a drowned four-year old daughter (who, when alive, we get the sense she wasn’t close with) and Charlotte can only run away from it all. Buckley gives a wonderfully measured perf as a woman who lives in a well-ordered world, but whose mask slips when that world is undone amid recriminations and guilt. Mother and daughter in the film are exceedingly cruel in the open guilt with which they condemn each other. A married daughter who longs for her mother's love is visited by the latter, a successful concert pianist. After an estrangement of seven years and following the death of her longtime lover, Charlotte receives an invitation from daughter Eva (Henderson) to visit her in the remote home where she lives with her pastor husband Viktor (Olek Krupa) and - to Charlotte’s surprise - her other daughter, the severely disabled and anguished Helena (Merritt Janson), whom Charlotte institutionalized.Ĭharlotte is charming, assured and self-centered, clearly more comfortable finding the emotional authenticity and complexity in a piece of music than in her own life. Charlotte gets another shock when she finds out that her mentally impaired daughter, Helena (Lena Nyman), is out of the asylum and living with Eva.
It would be impossible to duplicate the casting coup, star wattage and personal histories of the film’s Ingrid Bergman (she nabbed an Oscar nom for the role) and Liv Ullmann, but Candy Buckley and Rebecca Henderson find their own respectable incarnations of these troubled characters: one in high denial, the other desperately longing for a sense of self.īuckley plays Charlotte, who abandoned her two daughters to pursue a career as a famed concert pianist. In his film Autumn Sonata, made in 1978, Bergman explores a motherdaughter relationship in which the mother Charlotte, who is a famous concert pianist and also a narcissist, has not seen her adult daughter Eva for 7 years. Mother and daughter begin an impassioned rediscovery and clarification of their past relationship. She goes into the living room followed by Eva, who had heard her mother screaming from the nightmare. We are all some mother’s daughter, whether we were cherished or abandoned, spoiled or abused. The film is shot in beautiful color by Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist, using a palette of autumn colors oranges, reds, yellows. At night, Charlotte wakes up from a nightmare: it seems that Eva is choking her. Share A utumn Sonata (1978) cuts deep into a woman, even if she recoils from it. With silences, spaces and music, Woodruff creates a powerfully theatrical meditation of the chasm between a daughter’s expectations and a mother’s limitations. Autumn Sonata stars one of his regulars, Liv Ullmann, as Eva, the daughter of a concert pianist, Charlotte, played by first-time collaborator Ingrid Bergman.
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