Two strangers who know each other all too well. ![]() ![]() Time has transformed parent and child into two adults. In the end, there exists not merely a separation between Charlotte and Eva, but a chasm. But alas, exposure is not the same as clarity, and under the deluding guise of reconciliation, the child affixes blame, the parent justifies, and each challenges the other’s reality as subjective experience masking itself as truth. In one drunken night of accusations and confessions, a lifetime’s worth of stockpiled regrets, resentments, and recriminations are brought out into the open. News which doesn’t comfort Charlotte so much as unnerve her, setting in motion a chain of events confirming her suspicions that her designer luggage won't be the only baggage waiting to be unpacked during this fateful visit. Whatever water-under-the-bridge good intentions that might have existed behind Eva’s invitation are scarcely given chance to take root before Eva springs the news to her mother that Helena (Lena Nyman), Eva’s younger, equally-neglected sister who's stricken with a debilitating degenerative disease, is no longer sequestered in a nursing home, but living with her and Viktor. Eva’s motives for the invitation, not entirely clear even to herself, ostensibly harbors the hope that perhaps, out of grief or loneliness, her independent, self-reliant mother might, at last, be receptive to the kind of familial intimacy she has clearly spent a lifetime running away from. When Eva learns of the recent death of Leonardo, Charlotte’s lover of 18 years, she invites her mother for an extended visit. Seven years have elapsed since Charlotte and Eva have seen one another, the time and travel demands of Charlotte’s career still a source of suppressed resentment for the 40-something Eva, who can't help but associate her mother’s success and devotion to her art with agonizing childhood memories of abandonment and neglect. One of the most searingly honest and extraordinary explorations into the pain that mothers and daughters can inflict upon one another is Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata.Īutumn Sonata looks at the strained mother-daughter relationship of Charlotte (Bergman), a renowned concert pianist, and timid, soft-spoken Eva (Ullmann), a onetime journalist now living a quiet life in the country with her husband Viktor (Björk), a parish minister. But whether its source is cultural, biological, or psychological the love/hate, push/pull dynamics of mother-daughter relationships have always held a dramatic fascination.
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