Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" is one of the most underrated gems from any director that I've ever seen and is one of the most well acted movies that I've seen in recent years which makes me even more eager to dive into his work as a director after seeing this movie and his other masterpiece "The Seventh Seal". Ingrid Bergman stars in her final feature film role as well as the role that would get her a final Oscar nomination as Charlotte a successful concert pianist who goes to visit her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Viktor (Halvar Björk) for a few days to spend time with them and her sister mentally disabled sister Helena (Lena Nyman). Then things start to unravel between Charlotte and Eva about Eva's feelings toward her mother for having neglected her for all those years and basically blames her for putting her and her father though hell because her mother chose to pursue a career instead of raising her daughter and being there for her husband, and it is the scenes that focus on this that make it one of the most well acted sequences in any movie period. This is the only movie that Ingmar Bergman and Ingrid Bergman ever worked on together which is kind of unfortunate because Ingrid Bergman would only live for another four years and die from breast cancer and Ingmar Bergman would continue directing feature films until "Fanny and Alexander" which many consider to be his swan song and then move into television films for the following twenty years afterward and retire completely from filmmaking and directing plays and died in 2007 at 89 years old. As for Ingrid Bergman's performance I think the Oscar nomination was well deserved and also that Liv Ullmann deserved a nomination for best supporting actress. Ingmar Bergman's direction along with Sven Nykvist's cinematography sets the stage without one error during the movies hour and a half runtime. This is on e of the finest foreign films I have ever seen and is one of 1978's very best films.
Review of Autumn Sonata
