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It is sad to have to report that with Autumn Sonata Ingmar Bergman has made his third unsuccessful film in a row. Although it was again shot away from his homeland, the exteriors were done in neighboring Norway, the film’s language is Swedish, and the cast comprises several Bergman regulars. Moreover, the plot, unlike that of The Serpent’s Egg, returns us to familiar Bergman territory: love and hate within an intimate family group.

But this time it is the love-hate between a mother and daughter. Charlotte, a fairly important concert pianist, has always neglected or thwarted her two daughters; one of them, Eva, who has not seen her mother for seven years, has now invited her to her house. Eva, who has achieved a minuscule reputation as a writer, is married passionlessly but peacefully to a clergyman, Viktor; they have lost a beloved child, and so Eva sympathizes with her mother, whose lover and companion of many years, Leonardo, has just died. To the arriving Charlotte’s horror, Eva is also sheltering in her house her sister Helena, slowly dying of some dreadful, unspecified disease that is causing her to lose her faculties one by one.

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John Simon

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It is sad to have to report that with Autumn Sonata Ingmar Bergman has made his third unsuccessful film in a row. Although it was again shot away from his homeland, the exteriors were done in neighboring Norway, the film’s language is Swedish, and the cast comprises several Bergman regulars. Moreover, the plot, unlike that of The Serpent’s Egg, returns us to familiar Bergman territory: love and hate within an intimate family group.

But this time it is the love-hate between a mother and daughter. Charlotte, a fairly important concert pianist, has always neglected or thwarted her two daughters; one of them, Eva, who has not seen her mother for seven years, has now invited her to her house. Eva, who has achieved a minuscule reputation as a writer, is married passionlessly but peacefully to a clergyman, Viktor; they have lost a beloved child, and so Eva sympathizes with her mother, whose lover and companion of many years, Leonardo, has just died. To the arriving Charlotte’s horror, Eva is also sheltering in her house her sister Helena, slowly dying of some dreadful, unspecified disease that is causing her to lose her faculties one by one.