Autumn Sonata (1978)

          Although Autumn Sonata borders on self-parody because writer-director Ingmar Bergman indulges his pain-freak sensibilities to an excessive degree, the innate humanism and sophistication of his style—combined with two extraordinary performances—give the picture resonance. A tough drama about the ways parents and children hurt each other when they’re unable to connect, the film is particularly noteworthy as the only project on which cinema’s two most famous Bergmans collaborated: Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman returned to her native land (and her native tongue) to give one of the most affecting performances of her career.

          Swedish-cinema icon Liv Ullman plays Eva, a middle-aged woman living in a remote part of Sweden with her husband, meek pastor Viktor (Halvar Björk). Eva excitedly prepares for a rare visit by her mother, Charlotte (Bergman), a world-famous concert pianist. Immediately upon Charlotte’s arrival, however, myriad complications in the mother/daughter dynamic become evident. For instance, Charlotte is supremely chilly and withholding. Accordingly, while Eva was growing up, Charlotte was an absentee parent who expected her domestic existence life to be sunny and undemanding; by shunning family-oriented stress, Charlotte made real emotional connection with her daughter impossible. As a result, Eva became bitter, insecure, and needy. Thus, upon reuniting with her mother, Eva can’t stop herself from dumping loads of resentment onto Charlotte given the slightest opportunity. Furthermore, Eva surprises Charlotte by revealing that Charlotte’s other daughter, Eva’s sister Helena (Lena Nyman), is living in Eva’s house. Helena is severely disabled, and Charlotte finds time spent in Helena’s company excruciating—Helena radiates emotional thirst that Charlotte cannot quench.

          Filmed in extremely close quarters (the story rarely leaves Viktor’s humble house), Autumn Sonata is suffocatingly bleak. Writer-director Bergman almost never leavens the intense psychodrama with brightness or humor, so viewers are smothered by the dysfunction and pain of two complex women caught in an abusive cycle. At one point, the picture gets so heavy that Eva muses, via voice-over, how much she wishes she could simplify her existence by committing suicide. It is a testament to both leading actors that neither Charlotte nor Eva comes across as caricatured or contrived; these people seem agonizingly real.

          Adding to the grim quality of the experience is Ingmar Bergman’s choice to treat the piece more like a novel or play than pure cinema; actors speak in long, unbroken monologues and, on many occasions, speak directly to the camera or in theatrical soliloquies. Were it not for the amber-tinged beauty of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography and the consummate skill of the leading performances, the film’s arty flourishes would be fatal flaws. But with writer-director Bergman’s masterful hand pulling the strings, Autumn Sonata feels less like indulgence and more like an experiment—it’s as if the filmmaker deliberately discarded arbitrary storytelling conventions and used whatever tools he could in order to push as deeply into the anguished souls of his characters as possible.

Autumn Sonata: GROOVY

The Terrorists (1974)

While it’s fun to see a thriller in which Sean Connery uses his brains to outwit bad guys, rather than his fists or 007 gadgets, The Terroristsisn’t clever enough to justify the genteel approach. Despite naturalistic location photography by the great Sven Nykvist and a muscular score by the reliable Jerry Goldsmith, the storyline is too ordinary, and the storytelling is too clunky. For no particular reason, the narrative takes place in a fictional country called Scandinavia, even though nearly all of the actors use their own British accents. After a group of terrorists take the British ambassador to Scandinavia hostage, the country’s top cop, Nils Tahlvik (Connery), is tasked with defusing the situation. Then, when a second group of terrorists—led by British gunman Ray Petrie (Ian McShane)—hijacks a passenger jet just as the plane is landing in a Scandinavian airport, things get complicated. Petrie’s group plans to use the plane as a getaway vehicle for the group holding the ambassador hostage, threatening to blow up the plane (and its passengers) if they’re not allowed to do so. For much of the picture, Connery paces around the exterior of the British embassy and the halls of the airport, trying to figure out attack routes and exit strategies; he also fends off political pressure from British authorities and local heavyweights, since the two countries involved have vastly different agendas. Some of this stuff is interesting, in a procedural sort of way, and McShane invests his underwritten role with a bit of suave menace. Additionally, the movie’s pulse rises during the second half of the picture, as the story winds toward a far-fetched twist ending, and the lack of gunplay throughout much of the film forces theater-trained Finnish director Caspar Wrede—here directing the last of his five feature films—to conjure tension from circumstance instead of pyrotechnics. (Like Connery, he does what he can with limited resources.) Still, one need merely look at the following year’s Dog Day Afternoon to see how many terrific opportunities for hostage-situation suspense the makers of The Terrorists missed.

The Terrorists: FUNKY