Autumn Sonata (1978)

PG, despite the fact that it gets into some pretty heavy subject matter.  Remember, this is a pre-PG-13 era.  It's definitely not R because nothing really happens visually on screen.  But in this melodrama exploring the trauma affecting the adult child of a narcissitic mother, there's some pretty awful things that come up.  For example, the mother pressured the protagonist when she was a teen to get an abortion.  It's pretty brutal.  There's also a lot of cruelty of negligence in this movie.  For a PG movie, it's a lot. 

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Oh man, if I write faster than I've ever written before and actually can keep focused on the one distraction I know is happening in two mintues, there's a chance I leave today as the most accidentally accomplished day I've had in a while.  (Thanks much to a 12 pack of Dirty Mountain Dew which has caffienated me more than normal.  I wanted one to try.  I couldn't find one to try.  I bought a twelve pack.  Now I have cans of sugar keeping me typing quickly.)  

I'm going to have a hard time remembering this movie given a year.  Like, you will say, "I see that you saw Autumn Sonata and I'll just have to trust you."  It's not that it's bad.  In fact, this is much more in the vein of Bergman that I actually dig.  It's character driven.  It's tame.  For once, the adultery stuff is kind of mild.  (It's more of a background information thing as opposed to a major plot point.)  (Also, that's my big take on a Bergman movie at this point.  I don't expect "no adultery."  I expect "mild adultery.")  But it's got one of those incredibly forgettable titles saddled with a story that is almost dangerously small.  I mean, honestly, I split the movie into two sittings a day apart.  On the second day, I had to remind myself what the movie was about.  It actually took me a few seconds before I realized that this was one of those movies just about a mother and a daughter and that not much was going on.

Why am I cool with boring movies?  I'm not winning any friends by writing that sentence out.  But if I had to be honest with myself, thi sisn't exactly a barn-burner.  If anything, it is a movie that embraces the boredom of kitchen-sink melodrama, only it's a Swedish film.  What I find valuable about the film is that it is so locked into character and character dynamics that I don't even care that Eva and her mother were nothing like my relationship with my mother.  (By the way, I saw that Ingrid Bergman was in an Ingmar Bergman movie and never made the connection that the mother was Ingrid Bergman.) There's something oddly universal about the frustration that Eva carries for her mother.  Charlotte (Eva's mother) is a pretty unlikable character from moment one.  We get very quickly that she's a egocentric narcissist.  We understand also that she was a mother whose choice of cruelty was self-involvement and neglect.  That wasn't my mother.  But I also felt something incredibly relatable about how this movie built to a climax.

A lot of the movie is the dance of normality. I suppose the worlds of Ingmar Bergman tend to be a bit meaner than the world I live in.  People snipe at each other a lot more.  Me?  I'm a guy who keeps trying to make people happy.  I probably manipulate more than I should, but I get people happy while at least considering what I have to say.  (At least this is the relationship that I have with some people.) But the movie almost is just a scenario where Bergman is setting up a house of cards to knock them down.  There are lots of movies like this and some might even argue that all films are just the house of cards being stacked until the climax.  I probably disagree.  If there are some Bergman movies that thrive on their complexity, Autumn Sonata is just giving us a bunch of character moments where Charlotte does something passive aggressive and Eva seems to bite down on her tongue harder.  It's funny, thinking that I actually like the end of the movie a lot considering that the character change is just Eva telling her mother off for being a selfish pianist her entire life.  It's even a little bit of a cop out because Eva acknowledges that the only reason that the confrontation happens is because she's a little bit intoxicated by the time the confrontation happens.  It's a unique clock to be put on the climax.  Eva is almost aware that sobriety means that she must return to a life of silent suffering.  But by vocalizing that she's responding through liquid courage, it stresses that she's self-aware enough to understand that this is all nonsense.  

I wonder if Helena is a bit of a hat-on-a-hat.  I mean, Helena is almost a character that is meant to shorthand a lot of morality for us.  Eva, who has lost two children, is suffering from moment one.  She sits in her dead son's room --which has been left in tact from his death --and we automatically understand that she is deserving of sympathy.  Add to the idea that Charlotte is empathetically-dead when it comes to reacting to Eva's meditation and grief.  That moment gives us tomes of information about their character.  Yet, Helena's disability is just a way to cement how we should be viewing respective characters.  We get that Eva, for all of her distance, is a good soul who never views Helena as a burden. Meanwhile, Charlotte is put out by the notion that she has to spend time in the same space as her invalid daughter.  Yeah, I know.  It doesn't really hurt the movie to have Helena in there.  But I can't help but see that Helena's plot doesn't really reach a crescendo.  I suppose her climbing out of bed, begging for her mother to come to her is an emotional moment.  But we also don't really understand much about Helena.  It feels like her disability is being used a little bit of an emotional prop and not like it is integral to the relationship of Eva and Charlotte, which is the center of the film.

So why do I like this movie?  I don't know.  I wish I was the kind of film viewer who automatically liked the avant-garde.  I know that would make me superficial and kind of lame.  I like things a little weird sometimes.  But this is one of Bergman's really grounded pieces.  It feels incredibly true, even though it is over-the-top when it comes to Charlotte's treatment of the girls.  I suppose that I also like when things end on a bittersweet note as opposed to a full on happy ending.  Heck, I'm even trying to make myself seem less morose.  I like that this movie has a full-on sad ending.  I guess that's Bergman's success.  He made me believe that Charlotte and Eva were incapable of real change, even if Eva made one moment in time important to her through the consumption of alcohol.  Like I imagine Eva felt in those alcohol-soaked tears, there was probably a moment of liberation when she unloaded all of that trauma upon her mother.  And just becuase Charlotte was incapable of making real, redemptive change, it doesn't mean that it all wasn't worth it.  I suppose this was just a story of characters having that unstoppable object hitting an immovable wall moment.  A clear winner or loser would have taken away from the whole thing. 

It doesn't change that this title is going to make me immediately forget the movie.