DVD Chronicle

This time of year—"season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," Keats called it in his great Ode—is for being out of doors, harvesting the last crops from the garden, raking the fallen leaves. But sometimes it rains, and in October and November the evenings start perceptibly to draw in; you may want to retreat indoors for some seasonally appropriate screen work. Luckily, there is a lot of it to watch. Autumn, thou hast thy movies too.

Titles can be a guide to what's appropriate, as with Bergman's Autumn Sonata, which was in fact shot in autumn 1977 (in Norway, while the director exiled himself from Sweden and its overzealous tax authorities), and which opens with establishing shots of a picturesque fjord, late roses blooming, and red-gold foliage littering a driveway. Thereafter the film moves indoors. Even by the standards of this most interior of directors, Autumn Sonata is a closed-off work, dwelling almost exclusively in the rooms of a comfortable middle-class parsonage where a daughter and her mother, through a long sleepless night, attack each other verbally, rehearsing old grievances and failures. The daughter is played by Liv Ullmann, the mother—a famous concert pianist, neglectful of her family—by Ingrid Bergman, in her only role for Ingmar Bergman, and her last role for the big screen. At one point the daughter accuses her mother of having lied with words, having told the truth with her eyes, a line that seems a rationale for the film's technique. Both actresses do extraordinarily expressive things with their eyes, their controlled gestures, and their handling of props—the daughter's big round glasses, the mother's cigarettes. In this sense the film is a master class in acting for the camera in close-up, though it is also theatrical, with asides spoken to the audience and full-length soliloquies for the mother. Bergman himself might have called his method musical, as the second word of his title and the film's ABA structure suggest (the image of the daughter writing a letter appears at start and finish). We hear Chopin and Bach played; we hear a sonata explained; we learn something about the power of music to help us evade, for better and worse, the pains of ordinary life.

For Ingmar Bergman fans who would like a more outdoors approach to autumn, and more conventionally beautiful photography of its somber tints, I recommend the conclusion of Cries and Whispers, featuring three sisters in white dresses walking among great trees with russet foliage, followed by their devoted servant Anna. After the angers and despondencies of his great films Bergman sometimes liked to give the audience a short coda about a remembered, indeed cherished time and place, as he does in Wild Strawberries as well as Cries and Whispers (and as he does not do at the end of Autumn Sonata, where the possibility of happiness lies in the future, not the past). In the meantime, if you want a wholly outdoors approach and handsome cinematography to match, you should seek out a different European film, Éric Rohmer's Autumn Tale (1998). The works of this subtle French screenwriter and director, who died in 2010, tend to come in series—Autumn Tale is one of four about the seasons of the...