Showing posts with label Ingmar Bergman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ingmar Bergman. Show all posts

Sunday, January 29, 2017

AUTUMN SONATA 1978

The tragic back-to-back deaths of actress/author Carrie Fisher (December 27, 2016) and her mother, Classic Hollywood movie star Debbie Reynolds (December 28, 2016) offered a poignantly bittersweet, fittingly Hollywood-like end to one of my generation’s most conspicuous and compelling mother and daughter relationships.  
As though following a script co-written by centuries of accomplished mothers and the daughters who sought to emerge from under their shadow, the life trajectory that took Debbie and Carrie from the semi-autobiographical purge of Postcards from the Edge (1990) to the late-in-life mutual admiration evident in the moving documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds (2016), played out before my eyes like a real-life Fannie Hurst novel.
There is perhaps no relationship as fundamentally complex and formative and as that of parent and child. Nor, it would seem, one as inextricably fraught with the potential for misunderstanding, miscommunication, and the inadvertent infliction of crippling psychological wounds. 
When it comes to parenting, our culture, while not wholly forgiving, is inclined to make allowances for the unavailable father. Cast by patriarchy as the breadwinner/head of the household, a father’s physical and emotional absence in the home is rarely called into question if it’s in the service of carrying out his “duty” as husband and father: i.e., being the provider of food and shelter for his family. Hollywood is full of notoriously MIA dads (Henry Fonda, Ryan O’Neal, Bing Crosby, Carrie Fisher’s own absentee dad Eddie Fisher), but public scorn fell less along the lines of their not carrying their fair share of the emotional weight of parenting, but more along the lines of morality: the absentee workaholic father, while not ideal, is acceptable; censure is reserved for the philanderer father.
The same leniency has not always been accorded mothers.

Lacking much in our culture that supports, encourages, or even explains the reality of the working mother in terms that are not subtly reprimanding; women with ambitions outside the home are generally held to a higher, more critical standard than men. Women with families still face society’s two-option-only job default setting: motherhood = essential & important; mothers engaged in any professional endeavor beyond the scope of childrearing = nonessential bordering on self-indulgent.
(It's significant to note that this distinction is rooted in race and class, and rarely applied to women of color or the working-class poor.)

Paying little heed to the reasoning that a suppressed, unfulfilled individual of either sex is very likely to make for a pretty toxic parent, our culture rewards ambitious motherhood (e.g., that Octomom nutjob, the celebrity trend of serial adoption, reality-TV shows celebrating couples who crank kids out like sausages), while questioning the “maternal instincts” of any mother who has gone on to achieve a level of success in her chosen field of profession.
Consider the fact that successful men are rarely asked if they are afraid their work will lead to the neglect of their children. Family men are expected to have both professional and personal goals; meanwhile, working mothers are forgiven their professional ambitions only if they simultaneously assert (as often and as publicly as possible) that family comes first (Diana Ross, Angelina Jolie, Mia Farrow). 
Perhaps this sexist double-standard, unfair as it is persistent, is rooted in the not-wholly-unfounded presumptive tack that views the physical act of motherhood—carrying a baby to term—as the source of a bond unique between mother and child that is incomparable to that of father and child.
But whether its source is cultural, biological, or psychological; the love/hate, push/pull dynamics of mother-daughter relationships have always held a dramatic fascination. One of the most searingly honest and extraordinary explorations into the pain that mothers and daughters can inflict upon one another is Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata.  
Ingrid Bergman as Charlotte Andergast
Liv Ullmann as Eva
Halvar Bjork as Viktor
Lena Nyman as Helena

Autumn Sonata looks at the strained mother-daughter relationship of Charlotte (Bergman), a renowned concert pianist, and timid, soft-spoken Eva (Ullmann), a onetime journalist now living a quiet life in the country with her husband Viktor (Björk), a parish minister. Seven years have elapsed since Charlotte and Eva have seen one another, the time and travel demands of Charlotte’s career still a source of suppressed resentment for the 40-something Eva, who can't help but associate her mother’s success and devotion to her art with agonizing childhood memories of abandonment and neglect.

When Eva learns of the recent death of Leonardo, Charlotte’s lover of 18 years, she invites her mother for an extended visit. Eva’s motives for the invitation, not entirely clear even to herself, ostensibly harbors the hope that perhaps, out of grief or loneliness, her independent, self-reliant mother might, at last, be receptive to the kind of familial intimacy she has clearly spent a lifetime running away from.
Charlotte's arrival makes evident the elemental differences between the two women; the mother’s radiance and vivacity fairly fill the rooms of the tiny vicarage with a life force that can't help but eclipse Eva’s low-key timorousness. Daughter cannot hope to compete, so she retreats into herself. Mother is used to the spotlight, so she has little patience or understanding of anything that falls beyond its glare. Charlotte is pragmatic to Eva’s spiritual; self-centered to Eva’s empathetic; stylish to Eva’s almost studied frumpishness, and forward-gazing to Eva’s tendency to dwell upon and inhabit the past.
Eva surrounds herself with memories of her son Erik who died before his 4th birthday.
Charlotte, busy with her concerts, never met her grandson and was absent at his funeral

Whatever water-under-the-bridge good intentions that might have existed behind Eva’s invitation are scarcely given chance to take root before Eva springs the news to her mother that Helena (Lena Nyman), Eva’s younger, equally-neglected sister who's stricken with a debilitating degenerative disease, is no longer sequestered in a nursing home, but living with her and Viktor. News which doesn’t comfort Charlotte so much as unnerve her, setting in motion a chain of events confirming her suspicions that her designer luggage won't be the only baggage waiting to be unpacked during this fateful visit.

In one drunken night of accusations and confessions, a lifetime’s worth of stockpiled regrets, resentments, and recriminations are brought out into the open. But alas, exposure is not the same as clarity, and under the deluding guise of reconciliation, the child affixes blame, the parent justifies, and each challenges the other’s reality as subjective experience masking itself as truth.
In the end, there exists not merely a separation between Charlotte and Eva, but a chasm. Time has transformed parent and child into two adults. Two strangers who know each other all too well. Two individuals who share the same blood, yet are divided by a shared past each remembers differently.

Autumn Sonata’s alternate title could well be Face the Music, for running like an undercurrent beneath this searing chamber drama about the domineering force of love—the need for it, what happens when we don’t receive it, the lengths we go to reclaim it—is the subtheme of emotional accountability. As insightfully realized by Ingmar Bergman's screenplay and sensitively rendered by cinematographer Sven Nykvist's stunning images, Charlotte and Eva’s mother and child reunion is portrayed as a despairing day of reckoning. A chance to settle old scores and confront the ghosts of the past in the blind hope of embarking on a future.
"Just wait. We all eventually turn into our mothers."
                                        Nocturnal Animals (2016)


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 
Autumn Sonata's stacked-deck conflict—neglected daughter confronts selfish mother—is thrown a remarkable curve by Ingmar Bergman's employment of a fluid narrative perspective. Inner monologues are heard; Viktor breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing us; flashbacks and intercut action contrast and contradicts the spoken word...each of which plays havoc with any attempt on our part to draw pat conclusions regarding the truth of what has transpired between these women.

As the past is resurrected and mother and daughter confront each other with painful disclosures, the role of victim and victimizer shifts in strange and unexpected ways. Amid appeals for forgiveness that are met with blame, and recollections of maltreatment countered with denials, each woman is faced with a troubling dilemma: can a person accept another's account of the past as being true if the very basis of that truth signifies a profound misunderstanding of one another?
One usually has to reach an advanced stage of maturity before realizing that our parents are not flawless beings and are simply human. Like us, they carry the wounds and vulnerabilities of their upbringing and try to do the best they can with the gifts and limitations nature accords.  If love is imperfect and the past can't be changed, is forgiveness the true sign of our having fully grown up?

There have been a great many films about mother and daughter relationships, most melodramatic, a great many more teetering towards over-sentimentalization. But no matter the form taken: The Joy Luck ClubGypsy, Terms of Endearment, Imitation of Life, September (the latter, Woody Allen, channeling this very film)—the drama follows a natural familial pattern. A pattern that concerns itself with matters of neglect vs. over-protectiveness, and the rebellion/estrangement struggle that inevitably leads to reconciliation. (Joan Crawford's Mildred Pierce being the noir exception to this rule...that Vida WAS a pretty hard article.)
I grew up the only boy among four sisters. Both of our parents worked, our mom, in particular, finding her stride in the '70s after attending EST workshops and landing several promotions in her career working in government in San Francisco. I had my own parental issues with being a latchkey kid at the time (I retreated into movies), but my mom's fought-for and well-earned burst of feminist self-actualization during my high school years were particularly hard on my sisters. Perhaps that's why the unsentimentalized truth of Autumn Sonata resonates so strongly with me. It gets the emotions right from both sides of the argument, offering the bracing insight that some battles end with no victors on either side.
Much in the way that our parents become more recognizably human to us as we grow older, Autumn Sonata is a film that plays very differently to me now than it did back in 1978. At age 21, I wholly identified with Ullmann's character's point of view, today I can't help but appreciate the struggles of Ingrid Bergman's character as well. Both women are more alike than they'd like to admit, and as each is a product of a home where maternal love and affection were largely absent, I find that there's something hopeful (if not exactly happy) in the way each has coped. Charlotte, though indeed selfish and remote, has channeled her emotions into her art. Eva, while prone to dwelling on the past, has actually learned how to love (others, if not herself, just yet); and in caring for her disabled sister and late son, seems intent on not repeating her mother's mistakes.


PERFORMANCES 
Autumn Sonata is a film chock full of trivia tidbits. It marks not only Ingrid Bergman’s last feature film (one for which she was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe) but her only teaming with sound-alike countryman Ingmar Bergman. Bios note that it is also Ingrid’s first Swedish-language film in 11 years; a nifty coincidental turnabout being that she portrayed a pianist in her first major Swedish film (Intermezzo -1936) and plays one again in her final film.
Autumn Sonata marks the 9th of 10 films Liv Ullmann appeared in for Bergman, and their daughter Linn was cast to portray Eva as a child. By all accounts, when it comes to behind-the-scenes collaboration, the two Bergmans didn’t have an easy go of it at first. Ingrid’s outspokenness and studio-trained acting style were quite the departure from the usual “the genius is in” passive compliance from his familiar crew. But whatever difficulties went into the creation of Autumn Sonata prove more than worth the trouble, for Bergman and Ullmann give exceptionally raw performances.
Favorite Scene: Eva listening to Charlotte play Chopin's Prelude No. 2 in A Minor realizes that her mother's art has been the recipient of all the love and attention absent from her childhood 

A common passage in most every tell-all memoir by a celebrity offspring is that moment when the child grasps the extent to which their parent is devoted to their work. It's usually when the child sees the parent give forth with a sensitivity and emotional availability not present in the household. While admiring their artistry, creativity, and passion, the child nevertheless realizes they can never compete and will always come in second (even if marginally) to that magical "something" that gives their parent's life purpose.

Ullmann, coming as no surprise, is first-rate throughout and comes across very much at home in Bergman’s world of exposed faces and bared souls. At once heartbreakingly sympathetic, the next moment bitterly unfair, her Eva feels all the more real and affecting because her pain occasionally crosses the boundaries of reason. Ullmann’s is not an intellectual performance, but one deeply realized and felt.
But it's Ingrid Bergman who brings something altogether fresh to Ingmar Bergman's usual solemn rumination on the puzzle that is the human experience. Always a charismatic and compelling presence onscreen, here Ingrid Bergman plumbs depths I've never seen in her before. Her Charlotte is precisely the charmer she needs to be, the cold narcissist her daughter accuses of being, and the creative artist possible only in people accustomed to living with demons.
Ingrid Bergman is flawlessly unsympathetic and achingly vulnerable. I think it's my favorite of all of her screen performances.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY & REALITY 
A significant part of Autumn Sonata’s impact is the core of emotional verisimilitude running through its characters, dialogue, conflicts, and performances. Textured and nuanced in its ability to convey the heated, paradoxical perspectives of mother and daughter, at times the film feels so real it’s as though the words were taken from the transcripts of a documentary or group therapy session.
This core of truth I speak of is (at least for me) attributable to the incontestable thread of semi-autobiography Autumn Sonata is fused with by way of its cast and creator. At various times in their lives Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, and Ingmar Bergman have each been either the neglected child or the absent parent. The childhoods of both Ingrid and Liv were marred by the deaths of parents when they were very young, while Ingmar spoke often about his sickly youth and abusive father.
As adults, all three had bouts of being less-than-ideal parents. Ingrid’s well-documented affairs and marriages and 5-year estrangement from first daughter, Pia; Ullmann’s self-professed immersion in her work after the out-of-wedlock birth of her daughter with Bergman; and Bergman—5 times married, 9 children from multiple partners—whose work always came first, was perhaps the epitome of the absentee father.
Charlotte's abandoned husband Josef (Erland Josephson) consoles the adolescent Eva

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Back in the '90s, I worked as the personal trainer for the daughters of three different celebrities. One was the struggling actress daughter of an Academy Award-nominated actress from Hollywood's Golden Era. Their relationship was almost identical to that depicted in Postcards from the Edge; strained at best, competitive nonstop. The second was the daughter of a famous Hollywood couple, since divorced. To hear her tell it, her relationship with her mother improved in direct proportion to the ratio of the decline of her mother's career (i.e., her mother had more time for her when her mother suddenly found herself with more time).
The third client, while admitting to being the progeny of "Two raging narcissists" and forever in their shadow, nevertheless found happiness through therapy. Lots of it, from what I understand, but it seemed to be just the trick for enabling her to let go of the unchangeable past and forge a loving relationship with her parents in the here and now.

Testament to Autumn Sonata's honesty and unblinking gaze into the human condition is how, seeing the film again after many years, I still recognize these women. I've met them before in the countless mothers and daughters I've come across in my life. I also recognize myself, I recognize my sisters, and I recognize my own mother.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017

Thursday, June 30, 2011

FANNY & ALEXANDER 1982

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane tops many people's list of near-perfect films, but for me, any such list would have to start where Ingmar Bergman ended; with Fanny & Alexander, the legendary director's remarkably beautiful final film.
In spite of being the most expensive and large-scale film of Ingmar Bergman's career, Fanny & Alexander is nevertheless a profoundly intimate and introspective movie about a well-to-do family in turn-of-the-century Sweden which has about it the dreamy air of semi-autobiographical nostalgia and reverie. Almost impossible not to view as the summation of the director's impressive and influential career, its narrative highlights a great many of Bergman's lifelong preoccupations: fate, the existence of God, ghosts, the endurance of love, the pain of existence - as well as several actors and character names he has used over the years.
Bertil Guve as Alexander Ekdahl
Pernilla Allwin as Fanny Ekdahl
Gunn Wallgren as Helena Ekdahl
Erland Josephson as Isak Jacobi
Allan Edwall as Oscar Ekdahl
Ewa Froling as Emelie Ekdahl
Jan Malmsjo as Bishop Edvard Vergerus
Jarl Kulle as Gustav Adolf Ekdahl

You don't have to be an art-house aficionado or Bergman-ophile to appreciate Fanny & Alexander, for it is also Bergman's most accessible, warm, and life-embracing film. Full of humor and finely-observed details of familial devotion and discord, it is a film about family that is a welcome departure from the typical idealized depiction of childhood as an idyllic wonderland. Fanny & Alexander throws a trenchant light on the too-often terrifying vulnerability and helplessness that is the lot of the young, while commenting poignantly on youth's greatest gift...children are blessed with an almost superhuman capacity to endure. 

Viewed partially through the eyes of 10 year-old Alexander and his 8 year-old sister, Fanny, the beauty of this film is its ability to poetically capture that mystical time in a young life when, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, "Everything was possible and nothing made sense." It celebrates, at its center, that extraordinary aptitude in children to unquestioningly accept the real and the magical with the same level of gravity, accommodating both the tragic and joyous in life with an almost existential grace. In framing its magic realism within the structure of a broadly emotive theatrical family seen from the perspective of a watchful little boy with a vivid, almost psychic, imagination; Fanny & Alexander offers us a glimpse into the formative influences (both sensual and spiritual) on Bergman and his art.
"There comes my family"
Helena, matriarch of the Ekdahl family, lovingly observes the arrival of her offspring.

Although the theatrical version of Fanny & Alexander is a masterpiece in and of itself (clocking in at a considerable 188-minutes), my movie-geek prayers were answered when the original, uncut 312-minute version was released in the US several years back by The Criterion Collection (really, is this the only DVD release company that loves movies?). It is absolute HEAVEN! The opening Christmas sequence alone is worth the price.
As some people do with The Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind, I watch Fanny & Alexander once a year, usually around Christmas or New Year's. It's my idea of the perfect adult fairy tale. There's a villain, a haunted castle, a damsel in distress, evil in-laws, a sorcerer, and a magic potion. The literate screenplay (by Bergman) has passages of genuine poetry that are as moving and eloquent as ever captured in a motion picture. No matter how often I see it, it never fails to leave me charmed and teary-eyed.


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
One of the great gifts of getting older is that, with the gaining of wisdom (hopefully), comes a peace and ease with the unalterable vicissitudes of life. You no longer need armor yourself with an unearned belief in life's cruelty, nor do you need to sentimentalize your existence with fantasies of everything being rosy. You take the good with the bad and learn to cling to the joyful moments, large and small, grateful for friends and loved ones and those everyday miracles that you are content with never possibly understanding. Fanny & Alexander feels like a work of an artist matured. Gone is the predominantly dark palate of Bergman's earlier works; with this film he is willing to embrace the light along with the shadows.
Life Lessons


PERFORMANCES
I first fell in love with the faces (such a delight to see wrinkles, sagging skin, imperfections -character!), then the brilliant words, then the affecting performances...all are so rich and in such full flower that I can't isolate any single individual as my favorite. Like Robert Altman's Nashville, Fanny & Alexander is built on the ensemble players, perfectly cast and completely in concert.


THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Magic realism has long intrigued me when used in film. The matter-of-fact melding of the real and the supernatural seems a perfect stylistic choice for motion pictures, but few films handle it effectively. In Fanny & Alexander, the intrusion of magic and the supernatural into the corporeal world suits the film's child's-eye-view perspective, its Grimm's fairy-tale-like narrative, and its philosophical meditations. None of this is new territory for Bergman, but I think this film showcases his most natural, least surreal employment of this stylistic device.
In one of the film's many poetically moving sequences, Alexander's "guardian angel" grants an unspoken wish.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The first 90-minutes of Fanny & Alexander is devoted to a family Christmas get-together that is a cinematic marvel and could stand on its own as a separate film. Ostensibly an expositional introduction to all the main characters, everything from Sven Nykvist's breathtaking cinematography to the touchingly realized human interactions (there's an exchange between a sweet-faced little girl and one of the servants regarding the bearing of grief while others are happy that just tears my heart out), it is a sequence of familial warmth unlike anything I've seen. Virtuoso filmmaking.
  Helena: "Are you sad because you've grown old?"
Isak: "I'm certainly not. Everything's getting worse. Worse people, worse machines, worse wars...and worse weather."
I've never understood how Woody Allen, when trying to channel his idol Ingmar Bergman, always managed to come up with such shallow, constipated, and dull copies. Bergman's work, if nothing else, brim over with life and humanity. I understand how he's not everybody's cup of tea, but my experience of his films (especially Wild Strawberries...another favorite) has been that they are more passionate and emotional than cerebral, and a great deal more entertaining than they are given credit for.

Why exactly Fanny & Alexander speaks to me on such a sentimental level can be summed up by quotes from two other films that convey (more eloquently than I could) philosophical ideologies that get me in the gut every time:

From the film Sling Blade- "I don't think anything bad ought to happen to children. I think the bad stuff should be saved up for the people who's grown up. That's the way I see it."

and

From the film Little Children- "We're all miracles. Know why? Because as humans, every day we go about our business, and all that time we know...we all know...that the things we love, the people we love, at any time now can all be taken away. We live knowing that and we keep going anyway. Animals don't do that."

These simple sentiments touch my emotional core very keenly. They are the facts of life and compassionate human existence. In Fanny & Alexander Ingmar Bergman expounds upon them in such artfully dramatic and poetic ways that, in my eyes, he has created nothing short of an unqualified masterpiece.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011