Since I was a kid, the Academy Awards have been my Super Bowl. With only three major televised award shows representing the arts—music (GRAMMY), theater (TONY), and film (OSCAR)—the Academy Awards held the cachet of embodying real, old-fashioned Hollywood glamour. Because I wasn't allowed to stay up to watch The Tonight Show or play hooky from school to watch The Mike Douglas Show, the mere appearance of movie stars on the small screen was still enough of a rarity to make Oscar Night an occasion of near-religious ritual for my sisters and me.
Searchlights scanned the Los Angeles/Santa Monica skies, fans screamed from bleachers, Army Archerd asked industry-centric fluff questions (still preferable to that tedious, "Who are you wearing?" crap), and movie stars—definitely "on" with their scripted casual banter—gave acceptance speeches devoid of laundry-list recitations thanking publicists, agents, and hairstylists. The atmosphere of the broadcast was, by turns, glamorous, cheesy, self-congratulatory, fun, reverent, and phony as hell. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Even in my youth, it was easy to see that artistic achievement was just as likely to win awards as popularity, publicity, cronyism, and industry support (rewarding the big moneymakers). But Oscar's baffling inconsistencies and blatant lapses in taste and common sense all just seemed to fit with my perception of Hollywood and the movies, anyhow. Part pop-culture diversion, part art form, movies and the film industry have always been a captivating contradiction. You'd have to look to politics to find a larger collection of phonies, egomaniacs, and anything-for-a-buck sellouts; yet it's an industry capable of producing some of the most moving, enduring, exhilarating, and life-altering art. Go figure.
I enjoy the pomp, the spectacle, and self-parody (there is no soul more self-serious than the movie star transmogrified into an artist), and I certainly enjoy the ever-present potential for disaster or an unexpectedly touching moment. But my best contemporary Oscar Night experiences have been when my partner and I take advantage of the ghost town atmosphere of Los Angeles on Oscar Day and spend it out and about, DVRing the Oscar telecast for viewing later in the evening when we can fast-forward past the windy acceptance speeches or sound-alike Best Song nominees.
My earliest memory of The Oscars is 1967 when I was nine years old and my family and I watched the 39th Academy Awards in the living room on our huge B&W Console TV set. It was the year Elizabeth Taylor won for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's a year I remember vividly because I had to give a Current Events report on the telecast in front of the class in school the following day. I also remember it for this Las Vegas-y rendering of the theme song from Georgy Girl by Mitzi Gaynor (this is my first time seeing it in color. Thank you, YouTube). I've never missed an Oscar telecast since.
In honor of the 50th Anniversary of my first known exposure to the Academy Awards, I offer my non-essential alternative: The Le Cinema Awards. An obdurately subjective prize of merit awarded exclusively to films, performances, and artistic contributions that failed to garner an Oscar nomination. And so as not to encompass the entire history of cinema from its inception, the only films eligible for consideration for a Le Cinema Award are movies from my personal DVD collection. I haven't included any comments with the films listed, as many have already been written about on this blog (highlighted) or will be in the future. There is no individual "Best" prize awarded; each of the five films entered in each category is granted WINNER status by virtue of inclusion.
AND THE AWARD GOES TO...
Best Picture
Rosemary's Baby (1968) - Roman Polanski
One of the most incisively chilling contemporary horror/suspense films ever made
Eve's Bayou (1997) - Kasi Lemmons
A sensitive, mystical coming-of-age story of extraordinary beauty
What's Up, Doc? (1972) - Peter Bogdanovich
One of funniest films of the '70s. One of the funniest films ever made
Winner's Roster Eve's Bayou 5 What's Up, Doc? 5 Rosemary's Baby 3 New York, New York 3 Two For The Road 2 Barbarella 2 The Joy Luck Club 2 Meet Me In St. Louis 2 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever 2
Do you have a favorite film, performance, or behind-the-scenes artistic contribution that failed to get a much-deserved Academy nod? Would love to hear about it. What's on YOUR list?
Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial
plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis.
“Dying is easy. Playing a lesbian is hard.”
Fictional actress Debbie Gilchrist, co-star of Home for Purim in Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration (2006)
I really love suspense thrillers, but good ones are extremely hard to come by. Far too often, pretenders to the title fall short on both suspense and thrills due to predictable plotlines and a near-devout adherence to the structural conventions of the genre. It's a common writer's pitfall that suggests to me someone has invested in too many of those How to Write a Winning Screenplay workshops that offer enrollees a downloadable “Surefire Suspense Thriller” PDF template.
Granted, not many directors understand storytelling, the
language of cinema, or the rudiments of building suspense as keenly as Alfred
Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Roman Polanski, or Claude Chabrol. But one always harbors the hope that, should a filmmaker endeavor to try their hand at the genre, they do so with some understanding of the fundamentals. Without such a foundation, the alternative is invariably a suspense thriller that trades mystery and plot twists for contrivance,
coincidence, and implausibilities.
One movie that ranks high on the contrivance, coincidence, and implausibility meter is the notorious 1980 psychological thriller Windows. A jaw-dropper of a high-concept film, it stands as a dark and distasteful example of the “What the hell were they thinking?” school of cinema that I so associate with the ‘70s (which is actually when the film was in development).
Windows
is a movie of firsts and lasts: Windows is the first and last film to be directed by famed cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Annie Hall). It’s the first & last screenplay to be
written by one Barry Siegel (not to be confused with the Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times journalist). It's the last major motion picture to feature up-and-coming The Godfather/Rocky alumnaTalia Shire in a lead role--Windows being the three-strikes-you’re-out, last-straw flop that followed on the heels of the underperforming features Old Boyfriends (1979) and Prophecy
(1979).
It's the major motion picture debut of co-star Joe Cortese, who had heretofore only appeared in indies. And finally, Windows has the dubious
distinction of being the first film to be released in 1980 (January 18th), but,
seeing as it was pulled from theaters almost immediately after the near-unanimous
critical drubbing it received, it's a good guess Windows also wound up as the last entry in 1980's year-end boxoffice tallies.
Talia Shire as Emily Hollander
Elizabeth Ashley as Andrea Glassen
Joe Cortese as Detective Bob Luffrono
Shy, stammering Emily Hollander (Shire) works in some
mysterious capacity at the very picturesque Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Though we
never find out exactly what she does there, we do learn that her co-worker is
her husband and that they are soon to be divorced. Where Emily lives is picturesque too, her apartment being in
a quaint Brooklyn Heights brownstone huddled, troll-like, beneath the Brooklyn
Bridge. She shares this tiny apartment with a cat, a closet full of look-alike
outfits, and several volumes of books devoted to the subject of stuttering. We're left to do what we will with all this visual backstory, for the film refuses to disclose anything which might provide a clue as to why she's so timorous or why her fashion sense runs to Italian Tzniut.
We know Emily regularly sees a therapist and that she struggles with a stutter. What we never find out is why Emily, like Olive Oyl, has a closet full of the exact same outfit.
Returning home one evening after work, Emily is assaulted in her apartment by a man wielding a switchblade and a mini tape recorder. In a very difficult-to-watch scene, Emily is terrorized and
sexually humiliated (not raped, as many critics thought at the time) by her assailant, her frightened
pleas recorded for some kind of perv posterity. This roughly 2½ minute sequence feels like it goes on for an eternity. And as you sit there squirming in your seat, wishing maybe Rocky Balboa would show
up to kick some ass, somewhere in the back of your mind you’ve
arrived at a concrete certainty: you’re certain that nothing that follows in
this film (that’s now only 8-minutes old) will ever—no matter how masterfully
done—justify this scene.
Physically unharmed but emotionally shattered, Emily reports
the assault to a sensitive Italian police detective named Bob (cow-eyed Joe
Cortese), but is understandably reluctant to go into details. Enter
husky-voiced, over-solicitous neighbor and friend Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth
Ashley), an affluent poet whose obscenely large and equally picturesque apartment in
the same building suggests Emily is perhaps renting a closet. (Truth be told, Andrea may inhabit the same apartment building or live several miles away. For all the time invested in providing painterly images of New York, Windows takes a rather relaxed attitude when it comes to establishing location and proximity.)
Emily's soon-to-be ex-husband, Steven (Russell Horton), installing a display at the Children's Museum
While the traumatized Emily sits silently grappling with her feelings, Andrea spends her time shooting officer Bob lots of stony glances until either futility or boredom causes him to leave. In a refreshing departure from the usual suspense thriller gambit that contrives for a terrorized protagonist to remain living at the scene of the crime in order to better facilitate encore
visits from the assailant, Windows has
Emily hightailing out of her apartment the very next day and moving into a picturesque
(what else?) Bridge Tower apartment across the river. A place with a spectacular view, ginormous picture windows, and a convenient shortage of drapes.
Now, Windows is a
curiosity for any number of reasons, but the core of its strangeness lies in what
transpires at this juncture. Just when it seems as though the stage has
been set for the suspense part of this low-thrill thriller to kick in (vulnerable
heroine, potential love-interest/hero, motiveless assailant, suspicious
characters), the film just up and reveals the identity and motive of the villain.
Mind you, this is 25 minutes in. Suspense obliterated, this leaves us with roughly 60 minutes of resolution. (You’ve been warned, spoilers to follow.)
It seems Andrea is a lesbian pathologically and psychotically in love with Emily. Andrea's romantic scheme to win her lady love is to hire a cab driver to sexually assault Emily in the hope that the trauma will: (1) turn Emily off men for good, (2) send Emily rushing into her arms for protection and comfort, sparking a love/gratitude romance (3) all of the above. (How the hell did Andrea find a sicko for such a job, by looking through the Yellow Pages?)
*Note to hetero screenwriters creating gay characters: “That’s not how it
works. That’s not how any of this works.”
Windows is the last film appearance of Oscar-nominated Funny Girl co-star Kay Medford. She portrays kind but apprehensive neighbor, Ida Marx. Who shares Emily's fashion sense
Once Emily moves away and begins a hesitant and intensely dull love affair with Detective Bob, Andrea--because the whole New York housing shortage must be a myth--quickly secures herself a loft
directly across the river from Emily's apartment, and (relying heavily on Emily never purchasing blinds) watches the object of her
affections through a telescope while getting off to the tape-recorded cries and moans of Emily’s assault. Fun gal, that Andrea.
With the “whodunit” out of the way, you'd think Windows would devote its time then to exploring motive and character—a valid
concern given that we're shown precious little about Emily to warrant interest, let alone obsession—but instead, the film opts for atmosphere over content. The characters may remain vague and ill-defined, but New York has never looked as picturesque and moody (by now you've gathered that "picturesque" is the film's defining dramatic motif).
The Eyes of Rick Petrucelli, aka the assailant
To remind us that we're still watching a thriller, Windows throws in a couple of off-screen murders and a scene of Emily discovering something unpleasant in her freezer wedged between the broccoli spears and Cool Whip. But for the most part, suspense is limited to wondering just how Nutso-Bismol Andrea is going to go before the inevitable showdown. A showdown brought about by the screenwriter having the characters do the absolute dumbest things possible at the absolute worst time.
"Hello, Police? I just happened to catch a cab driven by the man who assaulted me...what should I do?" "Get back in the cab and have him drive you to the police station." "Oh, OK...will do!"
The arch dialogue may be mine, but I swear, this actually happens in the film!
Although falling woefully short of the mark by comparison, the movie Windows most obviously attempts to
replicate is Alan J. Pakula’s masterpiece of paranoid urban dread Klute (1971), a suspense thriller in which Gordon Willis’ evocative
painting-with-shadows cinematography is used for more than creating pretty pictures. Like Windows,
Klute’s mise en scène is New York as a
claustrophobically alienating city devoid of intimacy, and at the center, there's a tentative romance between a detective and a woman terrorized by a would-be assailant equally fond of tape recorders. But that's where the
similarities end.
Klute revitalized the standard detective thriller through its subjective visual style and character-study approach to its protagonists. Windows’ screenplay feels like it’s either a few story conferences short of a concrete approach or the victim of extensive editing. Behind the tired "scheming lesbian" trope, there exists a rather harrowing crime, committed by proxy. Yet, nothing about how the film unfolds aligns the bizarre nature of its premise with what seems to be a simple, not particularly profound desire to say something about alienation, identity, and the inarticulate human struggle to connect.
Andrea's therapist (Michael Lipton) questions her about the authenticity of her love for Emily "Have you said how you feel?" "I will. I...I mean, I can't yet...but I will."
With Emily, there’s her stutter, her inability to make her feelings known to her ex-husband, and the noncommunicative wariness of her new neighbors. The tape recorder used during Emily's assault reinforces this "vocal" theme, as does the assailant centering his knife threats in the region of her mouth and throat. As for Andrea, she has trouble communicating
with her therapist, expresses herself emotionally only through poetry, engages
in voyeurism and ecouteurism (sexual arousal by listening), and, despite her wealth and good looks, clearly has a
problem landing a date.
Add to this the echoing visual motifs of windows, glass, lenses,
reflective surfaces, and the themes of watching and being watched, and you're bound to feel certain that Windows has a distinct point
to make about it all. For a movie named Windows, there's an awful lot about it that's not very clear.
Windows is a classic example of all style and no content. So much obvious care and thought have been given to how the film looks and the ways windows can be literally and figuratively worked into the narrative. But it's the narrative itself that feels the flimsiest and least thought-out. By the time Windows limps to its conclusion, it actually comes as something of a surprise that all this curated weirdness has failed to add up to anything substantive.
Every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you The hit song by The Police was released in 1983, but it fits Windows to a T
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As tends to be Hollywood's irresponsible wont, when it "discovers" gay people, it can only think to feature them in mainstream movies in the most sensational, exploitative ways possible. That's why 1980 saw the controversial release of two movies featuring violently psychopathic gay characters within one month of each other. January brought the psychotic lesbian of Windows, while William Friedkin's Cruising, slated for February release, granted us another film featuring a homicidal homosexual. Although Windows garnered its share of controversial press, advance word-of-mouth about the film was so poor that picketers didn't even bother to show up when I saw it on opening night.
I remember being less concerned about the controversy than I was overwhelmed at the prospect of what I was about to see. Anticipation was at an all-time high for I had worked myself into a frenzy thinking that Windows was going to be as scary as Klute, gritty as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and as stylish asEyes of Laura Mars. I had thoroughly convinced myself that this was going to be something really special. Advance word-of-mouth be damned.
Did Windows measure up to my expectations? Well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. Indeed, I sat through it twice. But it wasn't because it was such a great thriller; I was riveted to my seat by the sheer weirdness of it all. It reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Igor drops the genius brain resulting in an abnormal brain ("Abby someone...Abby Normal") being inserted into the monster by mistake. Windows feels like the studio assembled an A-list cast and crew, sunk a lot of money into the budget, but at the last minute somebody slipped in a script for a low-rent, mid-'70s, grindhouse rapesploitation flick.
The one-two punch of Cruising and Windows appeared to be a harbinger of the decade to come. A time when Hollywood seemed primed to trade one dehumanizing, negative stereotype--the scary urban ethnics of the Dirty Harry and Death Wish '70s--for another--the homosexual as degenerate predator and killer--for the sake of a sensationalist buck.
To put such offensiveness into context, it was bad enough that this unimaginative wave of cliche felt like a conservative negation of the pro-sex, gay-liberation vibe of the sexual revolution of the previous decade; but in so associating homosexuality with death, the timing couldn't have been worse, what with the specter of AIDS looming on the horizon of 1981. Inclusion certainly involves gay characters being allowed to be the heavy in movies, but the larger issue is one of proportion
With so few depictions of gay characters onscreen at all, there is something inarguably problematic about narratives that cast gays (in real life, the traditional targets of bullying and hate-crime violence at the hands of heterosexuals) as the agents of homicidal threat to victimized straights.
As the '70s came to a close, gay characters in films were still depicted mainly in either comic or derogatory terms, so as far as I was concerned, the gay community was right to protest this rare instance in which you have two major releases with prominent gay characters, and in both they are depicted as pitiable psychopaths. Windows was so widely panned and dismissed that I honestly don't think it was still in theaters by the time Cruising opened just four weeks later on February 18th.
The distancing of time has made Windows considerably less offensive for me. Certainly less sensational. It's hard to work up too much steam over the absurdly written character of Andrea...she's more representative of a plot contrivance than a real person.
The film's windows/lenses motif is carried over to Andrea's Brobdingnagian eyewear
PERFORMANCES
Years after having made Windows, director Gordon Willis
expressed regret at having made the film, calling it a mistake. One big mistake I can attest to is the decision to have Talia Shire more or less play the character of Emily as a "greatest hits" reprise of her Oscar-nominated
performance in Rocky. Shire’s Emily
is a veritable portfolio of self-conscious gestures, downcast eyes, halting
whispers, and fleeting half-smiles tucked into a knit hat. As much as I like
Talia Shire (and I like her a great deal), her Xerox performance here had me feeling, at
least the first twenty minutes or so, that Windows
was the darkest, most surreal Rocky sequel
ever made.
I think the cautious romance between Emily and Detective Bob is supposed to be touching, but at times, they seem like they're mere moments from pledging a suicide pact
I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Ashley, but it surprises me to think that outside of a TV movie or two, I've only seen her in this, Coma, and Ship of Fools. She has an intensity that makes her always interesting to watch, plus a kind of Susan Hayward propensity for overacting that challenges the believability of her characterizations. Playing a can't-win role, Ashley is really not that bad. Short of resorting to that "unblinking stare" thing that movie lesbians have been doing since Candice Bergen trained her gaze on Joanna Pettet in The Group, her stereotypically-written role is mercifully devoid of grand "I'm a lesbian!" acting indicators. The screenplay does her no favors in the final scenes (where she's left to go right over the top without a net), but she definitely has her moments and her performance looks better to me now than it did in 1980.
"Why don't you ever smile? You almost never do." I think Elizabeth Ashley is very good in her moments with her therapist, as well as in this scene near the end, where an opportunity is missed for Emily and Andrea to interact in a manner other than just advance/retreat. Had the screenwriter seen Andrea as a flesh-and-blood person instead of just a gimmicky villain, perhaps he would have found a way to make this meeting between two women, emotionally damaged in vastly different ways, represent something more profound than a genre payoff.
Although Windows has an impressive pedigree and the odd cult cachet of being a film few people have liked, heard about, or seen, it's not, for me anyway, an undiscovered classic. What it does have is the stamp of being a visually stylish '70s-into-the-'80s curio which manages to be, by turns, both engrossing and off-putting.
BONUS MATERIAL
In 2007, Talia Shire appeared in a series of commercials for GEICO.com in which she portrayed a therapist to one of those cavemen that were so popular for 15 minutes back in the day—even getting their own ill-advised, short-lived sitcom. Shire playing the silliness absolutely straight is really rather marvelous. Commercial #1 Commercial #2 Commercial #3 Paperback tie-in novels adapted from screenplays were once a popular part of movie marketing. The novelization of Barry Siegel's screenplay for Windows was written by H.B. Gilmour. Gilmour carved out quite a career novelizing screenplays, a few of her many other paperback adaptations being: Saturday Night Fever,All That Jazz, and Eyes of Laura Mars
THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Gordon Willis died in 2014 at the age of 82. This autograph is from 1984, when I was a dance extra in the truly awful John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics movie Perfect (1985), for which Willis served as cinematographer. Some of his other more distinguished films are: Annie Hall, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, Pennies from Heaven. Considered one of the most influential cinematographers of the '70s, he was nominated only twice (Zelig, The Godfather III) and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010.
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 may be no relationship as fundamentally complex and formative 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 and social gender norms 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 one-time 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 contradict 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 own 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 Club, Gypsy, 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 parents' 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 that 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 their 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.
Clip from "Autumn Sonata" (1978)
Autumn Sonata opened at the Surf Theater in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 18, 1978
Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2017
