Climbing Mount Criterion XVII
Film:
Autumn Sonata (1978)
Director:
Ingmar Bergman
In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson's fine study of how a sort of chill northerliness emerges in various aspects of culture, there's a reproduction of a painting by a Danish artist named Vilhelm Hammershoi titled Interior With a Lady. In it, a woman is at the left of the picture, sitting quietly and a little sadly at a bare table; autumnal light streams lightly through the window behind her an seems to haunt the door at the right. It's a painting that's disarming and calming all at once, and, as Davidson explains, quintessentially Scandinavian: he writes about it in the context of a Finnish notion that "it is good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation -- 'pitaa hamaraa,' 'keeping the twilight.'"
Hammershoi's painting snapped immediately to mind while I watched the opening frames of Autumn Sonata, as Eva (Liv Ullmann) quietly works at her desk -- light is streaming in through the windows, everything is placed just so, and yet her husband Viktor (Halvar Bjork) is explaining just how broken things are. And this is, for all its manners, a story about corrosion, and how deep words can cut. The worst of the fight between Eva and her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her next-to-last role), is not when the screaming reaches its highest, weepiest pitch. It's when Eva softly plants a rhetorical dagger in her mother's heart: "You should be hidden away and kept from doing others harm." It is a savage late-night conversation, with a constant jagged undercurrent of wreckage -- characterized by Helena (Lena Nyman), Charlotte's sick and neglected other daughter.
Breakdowns like this, on film, are usually "and that's when everything changed" moments. That's not the case here; Charlotte is a concert pianist with work to do, and Eva is a thoroughly sad woman who lives for the responsibility of running a home. But it gets the flash point of realization about a loved one's flaws right -- and it does right to not become a hollow tale of reconciliation.
N.B.: My review of this film for Filmcritic.com is here.
Autumn Sonata (1978)
Director:
Ingmar Bergman
In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson's fine study of how a sort of chill northerliness emerges in various aspects of culture, there's a reproduction of a painting by a Danish artist named Vilhelm Hammershoi titled Interior With a Lady. In it, a woman is at the left of the picture, sitting quietly and a little sadly at a bare table; autumnal light streams lightly through the window behind her an seems to haunt the door at the right. It's a painting that's disarming and calming all at once, and, as Davidson explains, quintessentially Scandinavian: he writes about it in the context of a Finnish notion that "it is good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation -- 'pitaa hamaraa,' 'keeping the twilight.'"
Hammershoi's painting snapped immediately to mind while I watched the opening frames of Autumn Sonata, as Eva (Liv Ullmann) quietly works at her desk -- light is streaming in through the windows, everything is placed just so, and yet her husband Viktor (Halvar Bjork) is explaining just how broken things are. And this is, for all its manners, a story about corrosion, and how deep words can cut. The worst of the fight between Eva and her mother Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her next-to-last role), is not when the screaming reaches its highest, weepiest pitch. It's when Eva softly plants a rhetorical dagger in her mother's heart: "You should be hidden away and kept from doing others harm." It is a savage late-night conversation, with a constant jagged undercurrent of wreckage -- characterized by Helena (Lena Nyman), Charlotte's sick and neglected other daughter.
Breakdowns like this, on film, are usually "and that's when everything changed" moments. That's not the case here; Charlotte is a concert pianist with work to do, and Eva is a thoroughly sad woman who lives for the responsibility of running a home. But it gets the flash point of realization about a loved one's flaws right -- and it does right to not become a hollow tale of reconciliation.
N.B.: My review of this film for Filmcritic.com is here.
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