A late chamber film from Bergman still worth watching: Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman's 1978 film, Autumn Sonata, is another one of his "chamber" films, involving only 4 actors (save for a near-silent role toward the end), and w/ almost all of airspace taken up to 2 of the greats, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother daughter in a life-long love-hate struggle: Ullmann is married to a minister, quite a bit older than she, living a quiet and contemplative life in rural southern Sweden (or Norway?), Ullmann psychologically very frial, a hint that she'd suffered some kind of breakdown, that she married to get away from a difficult relationship. Mother Ingrid comes to visit - they had not seen each other for 7 years, mothers is a famous and completely self-absorbed concert pianist. At first mother and daughter embrace in happiness, but in moments they're picking apart their relationship the damage the mother has inflicted over a lifetime: abandoning her husband and, later, her 2 daughters (one of whom is near death from what seems to be MS, now living w/ Liv U., to the mother's chagrin), humiliating her daughter (a terrific scene in which the mother puts a knife in the wound, showing the timid and solicitous Ullmann all that's wrong with her piano playing), and on it goes. Ullmann's character builds in strength as toward the end she really lets rip and tells her mother all that she'd done wrong - but of course this changes nothing, and the disengaged, feckless husband watches from afar - like a distant and silent god? This film isn't as well known as Bergman's great b/w chamber films from the 60s - his reputation was beginning to ebb at this time, when he seemed so removed from the political and social uprisings that were shaking the world in the late 70s, but it's still powerful and beautifully filmed by the great Sven Nyquist.