Höstsonaten Autumn Sonata Ingmar Bergman 1978 Sweden1st time; DVD A journalist invites her recently widowed mother to stay with her and her husband, but things turn bitter… Draining in the same sense as Scenes from a Marriage, using extended conversation as a way of both establishing its characters and their relationships and also bringing them to their closure. It does this cleverly and interestingly, using non-diegetic flashbacks, all shot from the same head-on angle and from the same long-shot distance, as cut-aways during the conversations; there's only one time we hear any sound in any of these flashbacks, after a revelation of a would-be affair between the mother's husband and her pre-illness daughter... the sound is of the husband's footsteps leaving the house having kissed the daughter the night before, and the sound of the shoes on wood is quietly devastating. Bergman's use of colour isn't as obvious or interesting as when he uses it elsewhere, and it might have even looked better in black-and-white, especially with such an important scene involving piano keys. It is probably Ingrid Bergman's best performance, and Liv Ullmann is brilliant, playing out of type, and with the most to do over the course of the film. The two most interesting characters in the film, however, are Ullmann's husband who opens the film with a speech to camera, and the terminally ill daughter, whose scenes are effectively painful to watch. In the end, it is a good job that Bergman a) writes good dialogue, and b) is an expert at extracting good performances from his actresses.
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