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		MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Bergman (Ingrid) meets Bergman (Ingmar) in this fine but not outstanding story from 1978 of a concert pianist who meets up with her estranged daughter (Liv Ullmann) for the first time in seven years, and spends an evening confronting unresolved ill feelings from the past. Ingmar's been down this road plenty of times and in better films (Cries and Whispers); but even as a minor work, this is a powerful piece with two top actresses of their day. This was Ingrid Bergman's last film. --Tom Keogh

Autumn Sonata [NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - Great Britain] Reviews:
A scarring and utterly believable tale of parent-child conflict
2009-10-28 - Ingmar Bergman's 1978 film HOSTSONATEN (Autumn Sonata) portrays the troubled relationship between a distant mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) and her wounded daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann). Eva leads a quiet life along a Norwegian fjord with her priest husband Viktor (Halvar Björk), while Charlotte is a famed pianist who travels the world for concerts. When Charlotte comes to visit, Eva is initially joyful, but within just a few hours all of Eva's bottled up emotions spill over. Some remarkable flashbacks reveal the betrayals that Charlotte inflicted on her family while pursuing her career (they feature Erland Josefsson as Eva's father, through in a silent role). As mother and daughter bicker, weep and confess their sins, one might expect a happy ending. Bergman provides something rather different, however, and it undoubtedly will make some viewers furious. Nonetheless, I enjoy the film's observation that in real life, not all attempts at resolution between two people are successful.

Bergman has tended to portray priests either as pure evil (FANNY OCH ALEXANDER, DET SJUNDE INSEGLET), or good but very tormented (NATTVARDSGAESTERNA). Here, it's refreshing to see the vicar as a humble, content fellow and a loving husband. Lena Nyman's role as Eva's disabled sister is convincingly played, and the pain Bergman communicates through this part is devastating. The script includes a number of very quotable lines. There's been a tendency to treat the several film Bergman produced between the mid-1970s and FANNY OCH ALEXANDER as minor, but I would rank HOSTSONATEN among his best work.

Terrible Dubbing into English
2009-05-25 - This version is dubbed very badly. The words are not in sync with the scenes. It also has subtitles, which makes it a little easier to understand, but it would be much better if left in the original Swedish!

NOT A MOVIE; RATHER, A KIND OF CINEMATIC NOVELLA
2009-02-04 - Recently heard McMurty holding forth on the diminishment of reading in our culture; not so much the advancement of illiteracy, only the shrinking community of functioning literacy in politics, the arts and culture, and in human interaction. It would seem that the big books, the 19th century "psychological" novels as well as novels of social relevance and insight, are becoming neglected and consequently irrelevant. Probably true. And I could say, following that line of thought, that the big movies (and by that I mean complex, often novel-into-film movies) that used to dominate one's concerns, as well as the high end of SHOWBIZ biz, are themselves vanishing. There are fewer of them and their emotional content appears to have been diluted by cinematic or photographic effects; all flash and dazzle. If that decline in cinematic literacy has been a constant over the past few decades, say, since the end of the Cold War, then little, distilled small screen films like this one appear more potent, more suffused with meaning and importance by contrast with... What might have been. Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE may have begun the trend in two-character, intimate dramas. It was a for-TV show and had a big impact. Imitators here and abroad followed. For me, an over-abundance of riches. Except for Fassbinder, nobody equaled Bergman, though Allen came and comes close.

Personally, I am not greatly entheused by the prospect of prolonged intimate contact with people who are, after all, only fictional creations with bourgeois concerns and trappings, behaving in fixed, artistically-contrived situations, no matter how convincing-looking they appear to be. One thinks of the neuroticism of Pfeiffer cartoons.

Myself, dealing with people and their often literarily-inspired fantasies about their often predictable agonies of self importance is seldom entertaining or even bearable, like Freudian parlor games. Fortunately, skilled keen-edged artists like Bergman are able to trim the psycho-fat from even the seemingly unavoidale, even obligatory in vino veritas spasms of self-revelation -- like that of daughter Liv Ulman here, and mother Ingrid Bergman -- and present us with something like a dramatic scene, with a beginning a middle and an end. But not quite. To have been raised by a narcissistic parent resonates, but... Not quite.

This remarkable work, and it is truly remarkably realized, with moments of surprising and shocking beauty, has much of that quality Maughm disliked in the plays of Chekov; to him they seemed not complete or completed works, but disturbing, self-indulgent character sketches. I agree. Even this piece has the quality of a sketch for a larger, future project. And so it falls into a category of size and/or scale like a Novella to a Novel, or a Sketch or Print to a Painting. And that's not a bad thing. We don't look at prints much, anymore; etchings, engravings, block prints and wood engravings, and when we think of them at all, if and when we ever do, we tend to see them in our minds on walls, displayed the way small pictures are usually shown. But this is inappropriate. The best way to enjoy a print is at something a bit less than arm's length, as it is mounted on paper in a folder or portfolio, and that folio rests on an easel. We read a pring much as we read a printed or illuminated page. And if you have ever looked into a Rembrandt etching no bigger than a couple of inches square, you know what I mean.

And this wonderful thing is of that Rembrandt nature; something not best seen blown up on a big screen, or projected for a big audience in a darkened cinema, but best shown and best enjoyed in solitude, projected on a television screen. On that scale it comes into its own as a treasure meant to be savored in privacy: Something like one of those carved jade pieces that are pretty to look at and to examine on a writing table, but best reveal their true glory when held in a warm and appreciative hand.

A quiet, intimate revelation.


Underrated Bergman
2008-09-07 - Ingmar Bergman's almost fated 1978 filmic teaming with Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten), is amongst the very best of the films in his canon. It is also the most emotionally intense of the series of Strindbergian or Chekhovian chamber dramas he has filmed over the years, which includes his Spider Trilogy (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) and such other films as Cries And Whispers. That said, it is perhaps the simplest film that Bergman ever directed, even simpler in plot than The Silence. It was filmed in Norway whilst Bergman was in his self-imposed exile from Sweden over trumped up tax evasion charges, and backed with British and American money. Ingrid Bergman, meanwhile, had just been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her a few years later, and this was he last acting role for film, although she did a final television movie portraying Golda Meier.
The whole film basically revolves around the tensions between a famous pianist, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), and her visit to her emotionally fragile and bitter eldest daughter Eva (Liv Ullman), a four-eyed frump, who lives with her pastor husband in a vicarage. Bergman always seems his best when two female leads are front and center. He may be the best director of actresses in cinema history, and certainly the best writer for them....The camerawork by Sven Nykvist is not as blatantly showy in this film, although quite painterly in the gorgeous colorful interior of the vicarage is stunning in its reflection of the autumnal feel of the film and the state the characters are in, especially the gallery of close-ups that sear these characters and their emotions into a viewer's mind....Charlotte reminds me much of the Maureen Stapleton character, Pearl, from Woody Allen's Interiors, right down to her garish red dress, which clearly shows that she is vibrant and faces life, and to the motto she claims came from her lover, Leonardo: `A sense of reality is a matter of talent. Most people lack that talent and maybe it's just as well.'....
Ingmar Bergman is certainly a great director, but that greatness stems from his being a great writer, first and foremost. His writing is for adults, and not the deliterate preteens that current publishers (think Dave Eggers, James Frey, Elizabeth Wurtzel) and Hollywood studios aim their wares at. Be thankful for that, and for this film. Autumn Sonata is a masterpiece. Period.


The agony of blaming and forgiving
2008-08-29 - In his memoir Images, Bergman concludes that "Autumn Sonata" isn't a successful film for two reasons. First, he says that he lacked the courage or the talent to make the film what he originally envisioned: a drama in which the long night of recrimination leads to the daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) rebirthing the mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman). There's precious little rebirth in the final version of the film. Second, Bergman worries that the film was too self-consciously Bergmanian: that is, he'd fallen into the trap of making movies that he was expected to make.

I think the film is more successful than Bergman's appraisal suggests, but it's not one of his best ones. Somehow Eva's husband Viktor (Halvar Bjork) seems a fifth wheel. It's not clear what purpose his character plays. More importantly, though, Bergman couldn't quite get Ingrid Bergman to quit being the grand actress of the 1940s and enter into the ensemble acting spirit of his scripts. At times, especially in the first half hour or so of the film, to be entirely uncomfortable with her role. that she was nominated for an academy role was surely an homage to her career rather than her performance.

The film is intriguing, as all Bergman films are, because it invites us to explore the boundaries of repressed anger, parental-children relations, false memories, and the dynamics of forgiving. Eva feels stunted by her overbearing and aloof mother, and in the terrible night in which cards are laid on the table she shrieks that her entire life has been ruined by her childhood. But it's clear that Eva to a certain extent is using memories, false or otherwise, to excuse her own failings. She has been warped by her mother; there's no doubt of that, and Bergman uses the crippled sister Helena (Lena Nyman) as a very visible metaphor to convey the point. But at least some of Eva's neurosis is of her own making. So fascinating questions of the complexity of forgiving when false memories are at play get raised by the film.

Liv Ullmann is outstanding as Eva, the broken, neurotic, incredibly angry, and frozen daughter who longs for love but mistrusts any loving overture. Her performance is hands-down the best in the film. Next to her, Ingrid Bergman seems awkward.

It's worth noting that although "Autumn Sonata" is one of his chamber pieces, it's nonetheless one of the few films Bergman made which features natural landscape. There are several lovely shots shots of the Norwegian countryside and fjords where the movie was shot.