Word: bergmans
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AUTUMN SONATA Directed by Ingmar Bergman...
...women are mother and daughter, and their combat, on which Director Ingmar Bergman casts a dour and perhaps by now somewhat weary Northern eye, is all the more intense and enduring because it is grounded in love. Charlotte, the mother (formidably played by Ingrid Bergman-no relation to Ingmar-in her first Swedish language film in decades), is a concert pianist, acclaimed and prosperous, sailing grandly into late middle age. Eva, the daughter (Liv Ullmann in granny glasses, with a few lines of graceful weathering allowed to be visible on her ineffable forehead), is a church organist, the wife...
...much else seems right. Quite unnecessarily, Director Bergman has burdened Eva with a dead four-year-old son to mourn and a hideously crippled younger sister whose affliction in some vague way appears to be Charlotte's fault It is hard not to feel that these characters were included to make points already well established by the interaction of the two main figures. Eva's husband, who has little to do but smoke his pipe and look wise, is another minor irritation. The result is something close to triteness...
...mellifluous and easy and that the exquisite photography of interior scenes framed and lit like Vermeer's paintings shows little more than professionalism. The result, though the film is by no means unsuccessful as a whole, is that the actors tremble more than the audience. Passionate gloom haunted Bergman's earlier works, but professional gloom is what is visible in Autumn Sonata...
...that Swedish police grabbed Film Director Ingmar Bergman out of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater to interrogate him about his taxes. Last week, after a victory in the tax courts, Bergman was back directing in the same theater. Earlier, he had celebrated his 60th-birth-day party on the Baltic island of Faro. On hand were his eight children (by four wives plus Liv Ullmann), along with the four children of his fifth wife Ingrid. Bergman gave a smile of a summer night when Linn, his daughter by Ullmann, presented him with a crown of wildflowers...