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Monday, August 17, 2009
Contemporary Kurosawa: The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low
The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He first came to international prominence with his eleventh film, Rashomon (1950), which received both the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and a special Oscar as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the U.S. in 1951. Kurosawa worked steadily in the 1950s and early 1960s; from 1965 on, his output slowed to about one movie every five years. Kurosawa seemed to be drawn to stories that take place in historical times, and when thinking of a typical Kurosawa movie, one most often thinks of a story set in feudal Japan, like The Seven Samurai (1954). He did, however, from time to time make films with contemporary settings and in the early 1960s made a pair of dark and thematically challenging thrillers set in contemporary Japan. Both are visually and dramatically striking works that show Kurosawa successfully applying both the technique and the thematic preoccupations of his historical films to modern plots.The Bad Sleep Well (1960) concerns a huge construction company that develops real estate projects on land controlled by municipal governments. The company is a hierarchical organization of interlocking fealties not unlike the feudal clans and their samurai of Kurosawa's historical epics. The company acquires the rights to develop the properties by bribing corrupt government officials to manipulate the bidding process in its favor. The movie opens with a wedding—a long, elaborately staged sequence in which the daughter of the second-in-command of the corporation gets married to her father's personal assistant.
Several unexpected and dramatic things happen during the wedding. First, the police delay the beginning of the ceremony when they arrive and arrest a prominent director of the company for bribery and corruption. Then the bride, dressed in a traditional kimono, collapses on the way to the altar, and it is revealed that she is actually lame. Her brother ends up carrying her in her arms the rest of the way as Mendelssohn's Wedding March plays in the background.At the banquet after the ceremony, an executive of the company makes a bizarre toast to the newlyweds that is actually a statement of his innocence in the developing scandal. The drunken brother of the bride, in his toast, threatens to kill the groom if he ever does anything to cause harm to his sister. When the wedding cake is wheeled out on a trolley, a second mystery cake appears at the same time. This cake is a replica of a large office building constructed by the company, a building that became the object of a scandal when a public official implicated in bribery committed suicide by jumping from the building. The window he jumped from is indicated on the cake by a small black flag. All the while, a large group of reporters, drawn by the arrest and the notoriety of the company, lounge about in the background and act as a chorus, commenting on the action and supplying expository details. Careful viewers will be aware of how skillfully and unobtrusively Kurosawa arrays these large groups of players in the frame and moves back-and-forth and among them.
The part of the bridegroom, Nishi, is played by the great Toshiro Mifune. Gradually it is revealed that the strange goings-on at the wedding are part of an elaborate revenge plot by Nishi, who, unknown to the others, is actually the son of the unjustly accused official who jumped from the window. He has changed his name, insinuated himself into the corporation, and married his boss's daughter as part of this elaborate scheme. Critics have noted that The Bad Sleep Well is based on Hamlet, and although the picture is not a faithful transliteration the way Throne of Blood (1957) is of Macbeth, it clearly uses many elements of Hamlet. Nishi's bride is an innocent pawn much like Ophelia. Nishi even manages to gain control of one of the company executives who is believed to have killed himself and stages eerie "ghost" scenes for another executive in an effort to persecute and unnerve him. And as in Hamlet, Nishi's machinations end up backfiring on him and bring about his downfall.
Although presented as a mystery thriller, the movie actually examines serious ethical issues, in much the same way Kurosawa's samurai action movies do. In The Bad Sleep Well Kurosawa explores the distinction between justice and revenge. He asks the viewer to judge how far one should go to exact retribution, and if a wronged person is justified in harming the innocent (here Nishi's bride, who actually is in love with him) to punish the guilty (her father and his associates). He also shows the conflict Nishi feels between his use of others as cat's paws and his dawning recognition that they too are human beings with feelings. Kurosawa doesn't really answer the questions he poses so much as examine the effect on Nishi and others of his obsessive need to get revenge and to erase the shame he feels has befallen his family.
Kurosawa returned to a contemporary setting in High and Low (1963), based on a novel by Ed McBain. From the moment it begins, it is apparent that this movie is something special. Behind the credits we see a leisurely montage of scenes of a bleak, deserted industrial landscape—factories, rail yards, and docks—while spooky theremin-dominated music that seems to belong in a science fiction film plays. Like The Bad Sleep Well, this movie also opens with an extended tour de force sequence. The entire first hour of the movie takes place in two rooms of what appears to be a penthouse apartment overlooking a harbor and docks. The apartment belongs to Kingo Gondo (again played by Toshiro Mifune), a director of, and major stockholder in, a large company that manufactures shoes. The movie opens with a meeting in Gondo's apartment of several company directors soliciting his support in an effort to gain control of the company from its founder by joining Gondo's shares in the company with theirs, giving the group a controlling interest.
Gondo refuses to cooperate in the scheme, giving the others the impression that one reason is loyalty to "the old man." Already Kurosawa has introduced the element of the struggle for power within a closed organization not unlike the feudal power structures of his samurai movies, as well as the elements of loyalty and conspiracy, again not unlike the subjects of many of his historical films. The other reason Gondo refuses to go along with the scheme is that he despises the group's plans to lower the quality of the company's product in order to increase profits. In one dramatic scene he takes one of the shoddily made shoes they plan to produce and rips it to pieces with his bare hands to show how poorly made it is.
After the others leave, we find that Gondo himself is scheming against them and plans to use all his financial assets to purchase enough stock to give him control of the company. The reasons for this are complex. He began as a worker on the floor of the shoe factory, but when he married well used his wife's dowry to buy stock in the company and engineer his rise to executive status and financial success. Within just a few minutes, Kurosawa has established Gondo as an aggressive and competitive man ("You have to attack or get attacked," he tells his young son, who is playing cowboys and Indians with the chauffeur's son) who nonetheless genuinely cares about the quality of his product, a man motivated equally by ambition and principle.
It is these two things—ambition and principle—that collide when the movie takes two completely unexpected turns just a few minutes after it opens. As Gondo is happily contemplating his business plans, he receives a telephone call telling him that his young son has been kidnapped and demanding a huge ransom that will wipe out his fortune. For Gondo there is no question that he will pay the ransom. Gondo contacts the police, who come to the apartment to await the kidnapper's further instructions. Then the movie takes another unexpected turn when Gondo's son turns up and it becomes clear that the chauffeur's son has been kidnapped by mistake. Gondo is adamant that he will not pay the ransom. His wife, however, does not agree. "Success isn't worth losing your humanity," she had earlier warned him. As he waits for the telephone call from the kidnapper, the stubborn Gondo, frustrated by his helplessness, wrestles with his conscience: Is it worth ruining himself financially to save the life of the son of a servant?
During this section of the movie Kurosawa makes brilliant use of the widescreen format to convey the claustrophobic tension of the situation and Gondo's isolation. The action is confined to the main room of Gondo's house. The police team and Gondo, along with his wife and chauffeur, are often arrayed across the screen in tableau fashion. In these scenes Gondo is shown separated from the others—often positioned apart from them in the foreground or the background, isolated from them on one side of the screen, and facing away from them in the opposite direction.
When Gondo finally makes his decision, it is the ethical one: He will pay the ransom and suffer the financial consequences. At this point, about an hour in, the movie shifts gears and becomes less an exploration of ethical conundrums and more a straightforward police procedural. Yet even these more action-oriented sections are handled brilliantly, with equal emphasis on character, realism, narrative excitement, and visual panache, an exemplary version of a familiar genre. The police briefings are reminiscent of those in Fritz Lang's M. One sequence in which the police follow the kidnapper to Dope Alley, where Tokyo's heroin addicts congregate, is so dreamlike that it wouldn't seem out of place in a Buñuel or David Lynch film. It is also in this section of the movie that we finally see Gondo's residence from the exterior. It is not a penthouse apartment at all, but rather an ultra-modern house standing alone on a high, barren hill overlooking the harbor.This actually turns out to be key in the kidnapper's explanation of his motivation for his crimes when he is finally captured. (In the meantime he has coldly murdered three people.) The police had speculated from the beginning that because of the exorbitant amount of ransom demanded, this was a crime motivated by personal hatred, not financial gain. The kidnapper has never even met Gondo, though. His motive is pure and simple envy. When Gondo later visits him in jail, he explains how every day he sat in his dismal hovel on the docks and looked up to the great man's house looming on the hill above (the high and low of the title?), until all of his dissatisfaction became obsessively focused on Gondo. If Throne of Blood is Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, and The Bad Sleep Well his version of Hamlet (as 1985's Ran would be his version of King Lear), then perhaps High and Low is his version of Othello: The wealthy, self-made man who married into society becomes the object of the irrational hatred of a person who sets out to destroy him.
This version of Othello, however, has a happier ending. As in most of Kurosawa's movies the villain, driven by overpowering obsessions, ends up badly. But he does not succeed in destroying the victim of his obsessive hatred. The experience causes Gondo to re-examine his values, and instead of pursuing his power grab, which he is once again able to do, he decides to sell his shares, start over again, and found his own shoe factory. In the future he will be free and independent in more ways than one.
In High and Low Kurosawa redirects the conventions of the thriller-police procedural genre to his own preoccupations. The purpose of the movie is not just to solve the mystery, to reveal and clarify the meaning of the mystifying things that have been happening. Its true purpose is less to thrill—although it does this quite well, both narratively and cinematically—than to detail the effects of events on the people involved. In this way, even in modern genre films like this one and The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa is working in the tradition of the great humanist filmmakers like Jean Renoir, John Ford, and François Truffaut. For Kurosawa, as for those directors, all of whom were also visual masters and compelling storytellers, it is ultimately the people—the internal and external forces that drive their actions and the results of those actions on themselves and others—that are the most important thing in the movie.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Family Therapy: Two by Ingmar Bergman, Part 2
"A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction," says Eva (Liv Ullmann) to her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), at one point in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978). That statement just about sums up the view of relations between parents and children that Bergman expresses in the third of his 1970s trilogy on family dynamics, following Cries and Whispers (1972), which examined sibling relations, and Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which examined the relations between husband and wife.
A brief synopsis of Autumn Sonata makes the film sound like a fairly straightforward mother-daughter psychodrama. The movie opens with Eva sitting at her desk writing a letter to her mother, Charlotte, a famous concert pianist who has just lost her lover of many years, another professional musician, after a long illness. Feeling that her mother may be in need of comfort, Eva, who has had no contact with her mother for several years (some sort of estrangement is implied), invites her to visit the isolated home in the Norwegian countryside where she lives with her husband, a minister.
When Charlotte arrives, things are understandably awkward between them at first, but as they catch up and get reacquainted with other, they seem to grow more comfortable in each other's presence. The only real problem is that Eva has not told her mother beforehand that she has removed her sister, Helena, from the institution where she had been living and is now caring for her at the house. Helena is in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease and is entirely dependent on Eva for care and can communicate only with Eva.
As Charlotte begins to accept this situation, mother and daughter appear to be relaxing and opening up to each other. This newfound intimacy, however, suddenly lurches out of control when the normally reserved Eva confronts her mother during a late night conversation, spilling out all her lifelong resentments toward Charlotte in an unexpectedly harsh and bitter diatribe. Charlotte is hurt by these accusations and defends herself as best she can. Eventually the two seem to reach a state of emotional equilibrium and at least to have aired their concerns even if they haven't completely resolved them. Charlotte soon leaves and is last seen on a train blithely discussing her upcoming concert tour with her manager, while Eva is shown sitting at a desk writing another letter to her mother expressing hopes for a better relationship in the future.
Yet as one might expect from a film directed by the magisterial Bergman, there is a great deal more going on here than meets the eye. Like Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata is basically a two-character movie (the two characters are brilliantly inhabited by the great actresses Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann), and it is the incredible complexity of those characters that is responsible for the depth, subtlety, and surprise wrung from such a seemingly simple premise.
With her wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hair braided and fastened tightly on top of her head, prominent teeth, and frumpy clothing, Liv Ullmann's Eva appears shy, plain-looking, and innocuous. But from the beginning, there are hints that all is not right with her. In the opening and closing scenes, in which she is writing to her mother, she is actually in the background as her husband directly addresses the viewer, talking about Eva and explaining what she is doing. But significantly, he refrains from commenting on why she is doing this, and something in his manner conveys unease about the decision to write her mother. We also learn later that Eva is not a happy woman, that she has lost a child and been institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.
Eva's unexpected behavior during the late-night confrontation with her mother seems shockingly out of character. As the scene proceeds, it makes us question all the assumptions about Eva we have held until this climactic moment. We realize clearly for the first time that the timid and seemingly benign Eva is in fact deeply troubled, a passive-aggressive woman who may not even be fully aware of the true motivation behind her actions, and we understand the reason for her husband's air of unease during the opening scenes of the movie.
The percipient viewer might even have begun to wonder about Eva earlier in the movie, when she plays a piano piece for her mother, then shyly begs the reluctant Charlotte to critique her playing and perform the piece herself. This is like one of those moments in a horror movie when a character is about to open a mysterious door behind which some kind of threat is almost certainly lurking and the viewer wants to shout, "No! Don't open that door, you fool!" Yet Eva does open the door, compulsively pressing her mother into re-enacting with her a primal situation, with predictable results: humiliation for both.
After Eva's nearly hysterical confrontation with her mother, we begin to wonder about many of her actions that before seemed so forthright. Why did she contact her mother at such a vulnerable moment in Charlotte's life? Was it really, as she professed at the time, to offer comfort, or did she unconsciously sense an opportunity to attack while her opponent's defenses were weakened? Are her actions in regard to her sister Helena really as altruistic as they seem? Did she intend to use her as a pawn in a confrontation with Charlotte, an intention unacknowledged even to herself? She knew that Helena's presence in the house would unsettle Charlotte, yet she gave her no forewarning. A cynical viewer might wonder if this was to further throw Charlotte off her guard and make an unspoken accusation about Charlotte's neglect of her disabled child. After all, Eva's specific resentments about Charlotte's treatment of her as a child can be reduced to a combination of Charlotte's neglect of her family in favor of her career and her preoccupation with Eva's imperfections.
Then there is the question of why Eva decided to care for Helena in the first place. She made this decision soon after losing her own child, and Helena is as helpless as an infant. Could Eva be using her own sister as a substitute for the child she lost, not only to satisfy a psychological need to replace her dead child, but also to have another creature whose dependence on her will give her life meaning? At one point in the film, Eva says wistfully that she could be happy if only one person in the world loved her for herself. Yet this already seems true of Helena and of Eva's unbelievably patient and tolerant husband. Is she so unable to let go of the past, an adult still controlled by childhood grudges and perceived injustices centering on her mother, that she can't see what is so apparent to us, that she is already loved unconditionally by at least two people in her own household? So many things about Eva that seemed clear and simple earlier now seem opaque and ambiguous.
After that confrontation, we begin to see Charlotte in a different light too. If at first Eva was entirely sympathetic, appearing to be a victim, then Charlotte came off as comparatively unsympathetic. Under her soignée, poised exterior, she seemed a cool, aloof, and self-centered woman immersed in her career and avoiding true intimacy, a woman capable of superficial affection but not of any kind of deeper love, even for her own daughters. She treats Eva politely but is rather formal and distant with her. Something of a perfectionist, she is obviously repelled by Helena's disability.
As with Eva, after that midnight confrontation, a significant change occurs in our perceptions of Charlotte, a change that begins when we start to see Charlotte as the victim of Eva's hostile aggression. Charlotte does not react to this aggression with anger, but with mild and unresisting patience as she explains herself. She tells Eva how people of her generation are not by nature openly affectionate but that even if she did not express her love for her children, this did not mean they were unloved. She tells Eva of the personal difficulties in her marriage and of how the importance to her of her art often created conflict between the demands of her career and the needs of her family. She abashedly acknowledges that even though she tried to balance these things, in the end she invariably chose art over family. The viewer gets the impression that this is certainly the most intimate and self-revealing conversation Charlotte has ever had with her daughter, and possibly with anyone. We begin to see Charlotte as a more complex and sensitive woman than we did before—not simply a selfish person, but one defined by her own emotional limitations.
This dropping of masks and reversal of personalities hearkens back yet again to Bergman's Persona (1966). More and more, it seems to me that Persona is the seminal film in Bergman's later body of work, for so much in his later films seems to flow directly from that movie. For one thing, in Charlotte Autumn Sonata has as one of its main characters an artist. By the end of the movie, we see that Eva and Charlotte, far from being opposites in personality as they appeared at the beginning, are actually more alike than they believe. Both mother and daughter are self-absorbed almost to the point of narcissism. They are both overly sensitive to their own moods and feelings yet find it difficult to express their emotions.
The crucial difference between the two, though—the thing that allows Charlotte to move forward while Eva remains trapped nursing childhood grievances that have become a permanent part of her adult personality—is Charlotte's art. Artists may be no less selfish than the rest of us, but they have the expressive means of externalizing their inner lives. As Charlotte tells Eva, "Only through my music did I have the chance to show my feelings." It is significant that at the end of the movie Charlotte is seen traveling in a train to her next concert, while Eva is shown sitting at the same desk as at the beginning of the movie, doing the same thing—writing a letter to Charlotte as her husband looks on in resignation. In that letter she expresses sentiments of forgiveness and hope for a better relationship with her mother in the future that, in view of all that has happened in the film, simply do not seem realistic.
The other key element Autumn Sonata shares with Persona is the concept of the fundamental subjectivity of the individual human experience, what David Thomson calls Bergman's belief in "the harrowing separateness of people." In Bergman's later work, we see illustrated again and again the idea that we are each of us trapped inside ourselves, and that ordinary human attempts at communication are by their nature imperfect and fraught with emotional danger. This is the world view from which the later films grow.
Autumn Sonata, like its companion films on the family, shows that the emotional demands, both explicit and implicit, that we make on those we love temper love's sustaining qualities with an equally powerful ability to harm. In Autumn Sonata Bergman tells yet again a story of individuals that gives the viewer an intensive, microcosmic picture of all human relationships. That Eva and Charlotte can love each other only from a distance merely emphasizes the larger concept of the universal and unbridgeable distance between all human beings, even when they are related by blood, and when they share the emotional bond of love.
A brief synopsis of Autumn Sonata makes the film sound like a fairly straightforward mother-daughter psychodrama. The movie opens with Eva sitting at her desk writing a letter to her mother, Charlotte, a famous concert pianist who has just lost her lover of many years, another professional musician, after a long illness. Feeling that her mother may be in need of comfort, Eva, who has had no contact with her mother for several years (some sort of estrangement is implied), invites her to visit the isolated home in the Norwegian countryside where she lives with her husband, a minister.When Charlotte arrives, things are understandably awkward between them at first, but as they catch up and get reacquainted with other, they seem to grow more comfortable in each other's presence. The only real problem is that Eva has not told her mother beforehand that she has removed her sister, Helena, from the institution where she had been living and is now caring for her at the house. Helena is in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease and is entirely dependent on Eva for care and can communicate only with Eva.
As Charlotte begins to accept this situation, mother and daughter appear to be relaxing and opening up to each other. This newfound intimacy, however, suddenly lurches out of control when the normally reserved Eva confronts her mother during a late night conversation, spilling out all her lifelong resentments toward Charlotte in an unexpectedly harsh and bitter diatribe. Charlotte is hurt by these accusations and defends herself as best she can. Eventually the two seem to reach a state of emotional equilibrium and at least to have aired their concerns even if they haven't completely resolved them. Charlotte soon leaves and is last seen on a train blithely discussing her upcoming concert tour with her manager, while Eva is shown sitting at a desk writing another letter to her mother expressing hopes for a better relationship in the future.
Yet as one might expect from a film directed by the magisterial Bergman, there is a great deal more going on here than meets the eye. Like Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata is basically a two-character movie (the two characters are brilliantly inhabited by the great actresses Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann), and it is the incredible complexity of those characters that is responsible for the depth, subtlety, and surprise wrung from such a seemingly simple premise.
With her wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hair braided and fastened tightly on top of her head, prominent teeth, and frumpy clothing, Liv Ullmann's Eva appears shy, plain-looking, and innocuous. But from the beginning, there are hints that all is not right with her. In the opening and closing scenes, in which she is writing to her mother, she is actually in the background as her husband directly addresses the viewer, talking about Eva and explaining what she is doing. But significantly, he refrains from commenting on why she is doing this, and something in his manner conveys unease about the decision to write her mother. We also learn later that Eva is not a happy woman, that she has lost a child and been institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.
Eva's unexpected behavior during the late-night confrontation with her mother seems shockingly out of character. As the scene proceeds, it makes us question all the assumptions about Eva we have held until this climactic moment. We realize clearly for the first time that the timid and seemingly benign Eva is in fact deeply troubled, a passive-aggressive woman who may not even be fully aware of the true motivation behind her actions, and we understand the reason for her husband's air of unease during the opening scenes of the movie.
The percipient viewer might even have begun to wonder about Eva earlier in the movie, when she plays a piano piece for her mother, then shyly begs the reluctant Charlotte to critique her playing and perform the piece herself. This is like one of those moments in a horror movie when a character is about to open a mysterious door behind which some kind of threat is almost certainly lurking and the viewer wants to shout, "No! Don't open that door, you fool!" Yet Eva does open the door, compulsively pressing her mother into re-enacting with her a primal situation, with predictable results: humiliation for both.
After Eva's nearly hysterical confrontation with her mother, we begin to wonder about many of her actions that before seemed so forthright. Why did she contact her mother at such a vulnerable moment in Charlotte's life? Was it really, as she professed at the time, to offer comfort, or did she unconsciously sense an opportunity to attack while her opponent's defenses were weakened? Are her actions in regard to her sister Helena really as altruistic as they seem? Did she intend to use her as a pawn in a confrontation with Charlotte, an intention unacknowledged even to herself? She knew that Helena's presence in the house would unsettle Charlotte, yet she gave her no forewarning. A cynical viewer might wonder if this was to further throw Charlotte off her guard and make an unspoken accusation about Charlotte's neglect of her disabled child. After all, Eva's specific resentments about Charlotte's treatment of her as a child can be reduced to a combination of Charlotte's neglect of her family in favor of her career and her preoccupation with Eva's imperfections.
Then there is the question of why Eva decided to care for Helena in the first place. She made this decision soon after losing her own child, and Helena is as helpless as an infant. Could Eva be using her own sister as a substitute for the child she lost, not only to satisfy a psychological need to replace her dead child, but also to have another creature whose dependence on her will give her life meaning? At one point in the film, Eva says wistfully that she could be happy if only one person in the world loved her for herself. Yet this already seems true of Helena and of Eva's unbelievably patient and tolerant husband. Is she so unable to let go of the past, an adult still controlled by childhood grudges and perceived injustices centering on her mother, that she can't see what is so apparent to us, that she is already loved unconditionally by at least two people in her own household? So many things about Eva that seemed clear and simple earlier now seem opaque and ambiguous.
After that confrontation, we begin to see Charlotte in a different light too. If at first Eva was entirely sympathetic, appearing to be a victim, then Charlotte came off as comparatively unsympathetic. Under her soignée, poised exterior, she seemed a cool, aloof, and self-centered woman immersed in her career and avoiding true intimacy, a woman capable of superficial affection but not of any kind of deeper love, even for her own daughters. She treats Eva politely but is rather formal and distant with her. Something of a perfectionist, she is obviously repelled by Helena's disability.
As with Eva, after that midnight confrontation, a significant change occurs in our perceptions of Charlotte, a change that begins when we start to see Charlotte as the victim of Eva's hostile aggression. Charlotte does not react to this aggression with anger, but with mild and unresisting patience as she explains herself. She tells Eva how people of her generation are not by nature openly affectionate but that even if she did not express her love for her children, this did not mean they were unloved. She tells Eva of the personal difficulties in her marriage and of how the importance to her of her art often created conflict between the demands of her career and the needs of her family. She abashedly acknowledges that even though she tried to balance these things, in the end she invariably chose art over family. The viewer gets the impression that this is certainly the most intimate and self-revealing conversation Charlotte has ever had with her daughter, and possibly with anyone. We begin to see Charlotte as a more complex and sensitive woman than we did before—not simply a selfish person, but one defined by her own emotional limitations.
This dropping of masks and reversal of personalities hearkens back yet again to Bergman's Persona (1966). More and more, it seems to me that Persona is the seminal film in Bergman's later body of work, for so much in his later films seems to flow directly from that movie. For one thing, in Charlotte Autumn Sonata has as one of its main characters an artist. By the end of the movie, we see that Eva and Charlotte, far from being opposites in personality as they appeared at the beginning, are actually more alike than they believe. Both mother and daughter are self-absorbed almost to the point of narcissism. They are both overly sensitive to their own moods and feelings yet find it difficult to express their emotions.
The crucial difference between the two, though—the thing that allows Charlotte to move forward while Eva remains trapped nursing childhood grievances that have become a permanent part of her adult personality—is Charlotte's art. Artists may be no less selfish than the rest of us, but they have the expressive means of externalizing their inner lives. As Charlotte tells Eva, "Only through my music did I have the chance to show my feelings." It is significant that at the end of the movie Charlotte is seen traveling in a train to her next concert, while Eva is shown sitting at the same desk as at the beginning of the movie, doing the same thing—writing a letter to Charlotte as her husband looks on in resignation. In that letter she expresses sentiments of forgiveness and hope for a better relationship with her mother in the future that, in view of all that has happened in the film, simply do not seem realistic.
The other key element Autumn Sonata shares with Persona is the concept of the fundamental subjectivity of the individual human experience, what David Thomson calls Bergman's belief in "the harrowing separateness of people." In Bergman's later work, we see illustrated again and again the idea that we are each of us trapped inside ourselves, and that ordinary human attempts at communication are by their nature imperfect and fraught with emotional danger. This is the world view from which the later films grow.
Autumn Sonata, like its companion films on the family, shows that the emotional demands, both explicit and implicit, that we make on those we love temper love's sustaining qualities with an equally powerful ability to harm. In Autumn Sonata Bergman tells yet again a story of individuals that gives the viewer an intensive, microcosmic picture of all human relationships. That Eva and Charlotte can love each other only from a distance merely emphasizes the larger concept of the universal and unbridgeable distance between all human beings, even when they are related by blood, and when they share the emotional bond of love.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Ashley Greene Famous Actress Pictures
Alice Cullen
Ashley Greene in Twilight
Ashley Greene in Famous Actors and Actresses
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