Autumn Sonata Review

Review of Autumn Sonata (1978) by screenqueeen: 👍 5/5

My mother hasn't been fully present in my childhood, always away at law school or work after passing her exams, then studying theater, at rehearsals, or a combination of the above. But Eva's embedded trauma with her mother manifests through the treatment of her daughter Helena, suffering from rapidly worsening cerebral palsy. Perhaps Eva sees herself in Helena and how when she was her age she desperately needed her mother to be present and attentive to guide her through the pains of growing up. Instead Charlotte attempts to make up her absence with the grand slam of forced childhood dysphoria, sowing seeds of self-hatred in Eva's body image and self-doubt in her facilities to make honest interpretive decisions in her life and art.

The dynamic between Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman is electric, at times soothing with the promise of repairing their character's relationships and at others verging on disownment and chaos. Music is the bridge between them two, Eva following in her mother footsteps as a pianist but with a timidity bequeathed upon her during her contentious childhood underneath a quietly judgmental and forceful motherhood. In this I can identify with Eva, where a completely well-meaning self-made matriarch whom we barely have lived under attempts to assert control in the name of love yet having an extremely adverse effect.

Where Eva's realizations come more sudden to her in her childhood, mine have taken a longer time to recognize. Perhaps my mother is not as outward or deliberate as Charlotte in the film, or narrative fiction is never meant to exactly mirror the sad and cold realities of real life, but the similarities overlap in a compelling manner for me. Charlotte visits her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter in a quietly independent point in Eva's life, yet her mother acts as if she is still raising a child in the habits she continues to perform when Eva was a little girl. In almost every way, Charlotte has never changed because she has always been the most important person in the room, dominating with a naive sense of self that may never dissolve.

"I'm seized by fear and see a horrible picture of myself. I have never grown up. My face and my body have aged. I acquire memories and experiences but inside all that I haven't even been born. I can't remember any faces, not even my own."