Then I saw what I had not seen! Her mouth was ugly, a pale slit surrounded by transverse wrinkles. Then he recorded an ungallant, characteristic revelation: “She leaned over the desk so that the lower half of her face was lit by the desk lamp. At first, he thought her beauty “imperishable,” and he responded to her coquetry. He met with Greta Garbo to offer her a small role in his film The Silence. On one level of Autumn Sonata, Ingmar is trying to trash an aging Swedish beauty, just as he trashed the most famous Swedish beauty in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern. What follows is less a confrontation between daughter and mother, between nonentity and star, between Christina and Joan, as it is a buried sexual stand off between Ingmar and Ingrid. At the same time, Ingrid Bergman’s skill as a performer has not diminished, though Ingmar Bergman’s enthusiasm for his art seems to have waned a bit. It’s suggested that she is past her prime as a pianist. Charlotte is vain, chatty, vital, but vague (“I haven’t had a cold in twenty years!” she claims.) She uses liveliness and charm to cover her nearly unbelievable selfishness. Bergman cast Ingrid Bergman as Charlotte, a world-famous concert pianist visiting her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) for the first time in seven years. Autumn Sonata raises a lot of the same unanswerable questions of guilt and retribution that exist in Christina’s book Mommie Dearest, but with a trickier visual context. Ingmar Bergman’s late chamber piece Autumn Sonata was released in 1978, the same year that Christina Crawford put out her wounded (and exaggerated?) memoir of her tortured childhood with her movie star mother, Joan Crawford. “Ingmar can’t fully follow his own gloomy party line as he stares at this simple, oblivious, wondrous creature.”
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