AUTUMN SONATA: On Bergman

Every time I see a Bergman film, I leave the theater feeling like an outsider, filled up with strong emotions and cut off from the ordinary world. Bergman's technique is masterful. His attention to detail, the powerful still-lifes, and his sense of texture, color and light seem so perfect that I am lured into his world only to find myself feeling cornered. It takes time to retrieve my perspective after experiencing the alienation in which Bergman's characters are trapped. Once recovered, I think, about what I have seen, especially Bergman's portrayal of women, and often feel angry and cheated.

One reason Bergman's films seem provocative and insightful is his acclaimed treatment of and interest in the female psyche, Because his women characters are involved in emotional processes, through which they are stripped of sham and illusion, they appear courageous. Bergman's women are willing to speak unmentionable, defiant, and even brutal thoughts often suppressed by ordinary people. In his most recent film Autumn Sonata, a mother and daughter meet after an absence of seven years and try to behave with warmth and caring for one another. But they cannot. The daughter Eva, played by Liv Ullmann, slowly exposes her hatred toward her mother Charlotte, played by Ingrid Bergman, for failing to nurture her as a young child. Eva feels caught in a double bind: when Charlotte was immersed in her career as a concert pianist she couldn't see beyond her own concerns to care for the little girl who craved her mother's attention; when Charlotte tried to remain at home for a summer, she overwhelmed Eva with demands to alter her appearance and to prematurely force her intellectual development. In her turn, Charlotte discloses her own childhood. She was rarely touched and never experienced warmth or nurturing. As a mother, Charlotte yearned either to be cared for by her daughter or else left alone to her music-the only place in her life where she could express herself and really feel something. Both women seem to speak in the present, yet their perceptions keep them locked in the past. Their gestures of warmth and caring, Bergman tells us, have their base in guilt and as such are inconsistent. They are triggered by ideal expectations of how a mother and daughter should feel when they are together. They in fact despise themselves and one another.

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Bergman presents us with female characters who fail at living: "A sense of reality is a matter of talent. Most people lack that talent...maybe it is just as well." Eva in her secluded domestic life has seen her four-year-old son die and decides against suicide out of fear. She has been the happiest while pregnant. She lives outside of herself by caring for her disabled sister Helena, who also shares in the childhood abandonment by her mother. Charlotte does live in the world-a whirlwind of social activity, affluence, and praise-yet she admits she has merely accumulated experiences and memories, wondering "if I've ever lived at all".

Each of the male characters in Autumn Sonata remains in the background of this terrible catharsis. In flashbacks the men move about silently, tormented and stoic. In the present they seem to grasp the intellectual content of the women's anguish but are unable to participate themselves. They live vicariously, removed from real emotional exchange. In her book, Women and Sexuality in the New Film, Joan Mellen explains how Bergman treats his female and male characters differently:

His men fail largely because their pleas go unanswered; his women are ensnared at a much more elementary level of development. Their lives lack meaning because they are rooted in biology and an inability to choose a style of life independent of the female sexual role...Bergman presents us with a double standard. His men move in an ethical realm, his women in a biological one.

Bergman's male characters lack fullness and vitality, yet they are not limited by their physiology. The plight of Bergman's women lies not in philosophical issues, but in floundering through an inescapable psychological maze which offers no transcendence or even understanding. As daylight appears, after a night of painful confrontation between mother and daughter, Eva says in an austere voice: "The mother's injuries are handed down to the daughter. The mother's injuries are paid for by the daughter. The mother's unhappiness is passed on to the daughter. Is the daughter's misfortune the mother's triumph? Is my grief your secret pleasure?"

What we have here is the norm as ascetic 19th Century philosophical determinism. In an age when women are actively seeking to free themselves from the bonds of this heritage, Bergman presents female characters who have no vision of their possibilities. Before she married, Eva worked as a journalist and

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wrote two books. In one, she wrote: "One must learn to live. I don't know who I am. I grope blindly." The problem of one's psychological identity is important. Yet Bergman implies that even as a writer, Eva focuses solely on this issue and fails to come to grips with larger social, political or ethical problems. Charlotte works successfully as a famous and wealthy concert pianist. Yet Bergman portrays her as successful only in a superficial way. Charlotte constantly needs to tell others how people admire her and to point out her attractive qualities. She lacks fluidity in her movements. Her frenetic level of activity and troublesome insomnia belie the degree of ease she really has in her life.

Together as mother and daughter, Charlotte and Eva seem destined to mourn their failure to act appropriately in their designated roles. In accordance with his deterministic philosophy, Bergman posits only one satisfactory mode of behavior for them. Rather than question whether the traditional norms for mother-daughter relationships fit the present situation, Bergman reinforces the ideal standard of "nurturant mother" and "grateful daughter". Anything less than these standards causes disappointment.

Given that today more women work outside the home, men can shoulder part of the responsibility for nurturing the young. The myth of "super-mother" needs re-evaluation. Rather than feel guilty for falling short of this standard, perhaps mothers can see themselves as part of humanity subject to error and vulnerable to inconsistency. Perhaps mothers would then feel more comfortable with themselves and thus with their daughters' unique “achievements”. The stereotype of “grateful daughter” also needs to be

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challenged. There is no actual reason why a daughter must feel indebted to maternal sacrifices if the mother freely chooses to sacrifice herself to her children. Likewise, the burden of guilt for her mother's trials unfairly piaces the daughter in an untenable dilemma. There is no way that a daughter can undo her mother's pain; she can only provide support and caring if she truly feels it. Bergman ignores the potential for changing the way mothers and daughters can interact and if lucky, love one another. He reinforces rigid norms by having Eva and Charlotte pine for the loss of their respective roles.

At the conclusion of Autumn Sonata, Eva has had the immediate benefit of catharsis catalyzed by a bitter past. After their night-long encounter, Charlotte feels humiliated and hopeless. She asks her daughter: "Help me! Put your arms around me!" Her plea is refused. Mother and daughter reach a stalemate which offers neither an apparent resolution nor any

way of integrating this new information into a fuller, more mature relationship. Charlotte leaves the nextmorning. She is bereft of integrity and frightened by her solitude. Eva wanders through a cemetery where she once again dismisses suicide. She will live to take care of her sister and husband.

In the next scene, Eva sits at her writing table composing a letter to her mother just as she does at the beginning of the film. She writes an apology with the face of sincerity: "I've tortured you with a soured hatred." She wants to care for her mother. She wants to persist. There is neither a hint of anger nor any sign that she has synthesized her emotional experience into a more developed perspective. Because Bergman does not show Eva actually coming to terms with her exposed anger and gaining a more sophisticated appreciation of her relationship with Charlotte, he implies that Eva is deceiving herself. Guilt has subsumed her hostility. She tries to return magically to her former status as "grateful daughter". She attempts to discount all that she has said to her mother. She simply yearns to fall back into her role and care for others. The camera moves in on her mother's face, sad and withered. As the daughter's words rise up before her, Charlotte looks dazed and unmoved. She can't go home again because she has none.

By portraying Eva and Charlotte as uneasy in the world and bound to their female roles, Bergman takes a political position which precludes the possibility of liberation. His magnificent technique can overwhelm almost to the point at which I might sigh and say: "Yes, that's how mothers and

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February, 1979/What She Wants/Page 7

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