![]() I know what a terrible blow this must be to you. I was in town yesterday and ran into Agnes…She told me that Leonardo had died. The letter she is depicted writing is to Charlotte, inviting her to stay over: Most revealing is that Eva’s very first piece of dialogue does not relate to herself, but to her mother. “My biggest obstacle is that I don’t know who I am…If anyone ever loves me as I am I may dare at last to look at myself.”Īs the audience will soon discover, Eva’s strive towards the formation of her own identity and purpose was shaped by the traumatic and difficult childhood she lived with her self-centred mother. Viktor reads from one of two of Eva’s ‘small novels’ and reveals his wife’s defining struggle: It is not a feeling that will ever leave the watcher for the film’s duration. The audience will too feel as if they are observing, and perhaps infringing on, the privacy of an individual’s, apparently, quiet peace. It opens with an introduction from Eva’s husband Viktor (Halvar Björk) who stands beside the open door which frames his wife’s distant posture. ![]() Bergman presents a brutal portrayal of daughter Eva’s (Liv Ullman) and mother Charlotte’s (Ingrid Bergman) loving yet monstrous connection. The title is ironic but we must remember that autumn is the season after summer, and the season preceding winter it is a season associated with harvest and death simultaneously. Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata is a repudiation of all romanticisation, and the film far from evokes its title’s sentimental overtones. A mother’s love for her daughter, or any of her children, is “supposed” to be the strongest force, an unbroken bond, a thread that can never be cut - yes, yes, and yes, but if all of these phrases are taken out of their romanticised context, does not the mother-daughter bond appear quite stifling, claustrophobic, and possessive? There is no other relationship in the world like the relationship between a mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” “Do we ever stop being mother and daughter?”
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