Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [168]
She was, however, in excellent form with her review of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. It was a prestige project, a work by an acknowledged master that also featured a topical theme—the bitter conflict of a mother and daughter. Autumn Sonata told the story of Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman, in her first film with the director), a famed Swedish concert pianist who goes to visit her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), married to a country parson. The daughter is a study in pent-up rage, which she blames on her mother’s years of neglect.
The critics, many of them impressed by the mere idea of a collaboration between the two Bergmans, were generally respectful of the film, although most of the praise was qualified; Andrew Sarris, for one, admitted that at some point he “began tuning out on Eva’s tirade.” Autumn Sonata was the kind of story Pauline was temperamentally disposed to dislike. She resented that Bergman presented Eva’s point of view “as the truth. Not just the truth as she nearsightedly sees it but the truth.” The audience was given no real opportunity to see Charlotte’s point of view, and as a result, the movie seemed like a long, shrill whine. “It’s like the grievances of someone who has just gone into therapy—Mother did this to me, she did that to me, and that and that and that,” Pauline wrote. “Eva is vengeful and overexplicit and humorless; she takes no responsibility for anything. Without any recognition of the one-sidedness, Ingmar Bergman lays it on so thick—makes it all so grueling—that we have to reject it.”
It was unquestionably a genuine reaction to the movie’s point of view—but it could hardly have escaped the attention of those close to her that the relationship between Charlotte and Eva bore certain resemblances to that between Pauline and Gina. Pauline’s daughter had developed into a lovely woman who looked far younger than thirty and had retained her gentle, soft-spoken manner. (Pauline’s friend the writer Martha Sherman Bacon observed in a letter that Gina resembled a Gainsborough portrait, A Child of Quality in Peasant Dress.) Mother and daughter’s relationship had had its fractious moments at various points in the past few years. By now Gina had given up dance and become seriously interested in painting. Outwardly, Pauline seemed very supportive of her work. But the silver cord remained as tightly attached as ever, and Pauline could commit herself to Gina’s creative interests only to the point that they didn’t threaten her own needs for her daughter’s time and attention. Simultaneously, she encouraged Gina and worried that she might abandon her. Many friends felt that if Gina had expressed a desire to pursue a career as an artist elsewhere, Pauline would have done her best to dissuade her from it. She had simply grown too accustomed to having her daughter close by. Carrie Rickey remembered a phone conversation between her own mother and Pauline in the mid-’70s in which Pauline stressed how important it was for mothers to meddle in their daughters’ lives and set them on the right path.
Some who were close to the two women felt that Gina had assumed the mother role at times: Whenever Pauline drove herself with deadlines, drank too much, and didn’t get enough sleep, Gina would urge her to maintain a better health regimen and take care of herself. Pauline had become friendly with a young movie-lover named Al Avant, who later angered her by gently encouraging Gina to go her own way. “He was always pushing her to get out and start her own life and pointing out to her that Pauline was dominating her life, which was true,” said Richard Albarino. Eventually, he recalled, Al Avant “was cast out in no uncertain terms. Pauline didn’t mind people