Cinema: Cooling Gloom

AUTUMN SONATA Directed by Ingmar Bergman

A woman of about 40 sits at the piano, somewhat haltingly playing a Chopin prelude. A second woman, perhaps 20 years older, wearing an expression that is meant to show patience, listens to the end, offers a teaspoonful of praise, then takes over the piano herself, makes a show of shutting the music rack and flexing her fingers, and plays the piece superbly, from memory. The performance is a cruelty, and the face of the younger woman shows that it has had its intended effect.

The two women are mother and daughter, and their combat, on which Director Ingmar Bergman casts a dour and perhaps by now somewhat weary Northern eye, is all the more intense and enduring because it is grounded in love. Charlotte, the mother (formidably played by Ingrid Bergman—no relation to Ingmar—in her first Swedish language film in decades), is a concert pianist, acclaimed and prosperous, sailing grandly into late middle age. Eva, the daughter (Liv Ullmann in granny glasses, with a few lines of graceful weathering allowed to be visible on her ineffable forehead), is a church organist, the wife of a country pastor, a woman soft, sweet and intelligent. They have not met in seven years, and it is evident that something other than the mother's illustrious career has kept them apart. Recently, however, the mother's life has been disrupted by the death of an old lover, and Eva has reached out in spontaneous affection with an invitation to visit the parsonage.

The ensuing course of accusation and revelation seems solid enough as psychology, but if the exhausting process succeeds as drama—and a viewer finds himself veering toward mutiny—it is mostly because the two actresses are superb. We feel stingingly the hopeless adoration of the little girl of 30 years ago (played in brief flashback by Linn Ullmann, Liv's daughter) for the glittering mother who ignored her, and the destructive frustration of the mother who could not show the emotion except through the ordered avenues of music.

But not much else seems right. Quite unnecessarily, Director Bergman has burdened Eva with a dead four-year-old son to mourn and a hideously crippled younger sister whose affliction in some vague way appears to be Charlotte's fault It is hard not to feel that these characters were included to make points already well established by the interaction of the two main figures. Eva's husband, who has little to do but smoke his pipe and look wise, is another minor irritation. The result is something close to triteness.

A viewer whose mind has begun to stray in this direction reflects that the English title, also, is a bit too mellifluous and easy and that the exquisite photography of interior scenes framed and lit like Vermeer's paintings shows little more than professionalism. The result, though the film is by no means unsuccessful as a whole, is that the actors tremble more than the audience. Passionate gloom haunted Bergman's earlier works, but professional gloom is what is visible in Autumn Sonata.