Her long-term boyfriend's death spurs concert pianist Charlotte into visiting her eldest daughter Eva, from whom she's been estranged for seven years. At Eva's house she also meets Helena, her severely disabled other daughter whom she had confined to a hospital for life, but whose care Eva has taken over.
What follows in "Autumn Sonata," the piercingly powerful 1978 movie classic directed by Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman and starring Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann and Lena Nyman, is a brutally frank encounter one evening between Charlotte and Eva, in which they pour out their long-suppressed true feelings about each other.
Such drama is a hard act to follow, but that's the challenge Hirotaka Kumabayashi has set himself after a three-year break following his Mainichi Art Award-winning staging of avant-garde French artist Jean Cocteau's 1938 play "Les Parents Terrible."