My life as an Autumn Sonata - A Personal Review of a late 1970s cinematic masterpiece

A beautiful symphony... sometimes.

I want to be a filmmaker. I won’t dismiss my unfamiliarity with anything that has to do with creating worlds and telling personal, or impersonal, stories through visual cues as what I have been used to for a long time has been writing, but it is this autonomy, at least ideally, with how your story could be told that piqued my interest in filmmaking.

I’ve always loved films, what I can say has changed is my taste – a refinement if you will – but films have always been paramount in my life. I would make my mother take my siblings and me to the cinemas, Ozone Cinema at Yaba then Filmhouse Cinema at Surulere, every school break to watch whatever was screening, those memories forged a deep admiration for the movies! But I was not interested in making films, just telling stories – science, tech, and a host of other things too.

My interest in filmmaking began after some self-reflection during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just finished a course on creative writing and started a blog for some short stories I came up with. The blog garnered considerable support but it didn’t feel like a complete medium. It felt insufficient. I thought I had the potential to push the boundaries of storytelling and bend techniques to my will (I was 17 years old) and short stories weren’t enough to do that. Of course, in hindsight, I was wrong about short stories being a lesser medium, but this was what pushed me to filmmaking. The pursuit of more. It started with screenwriting; I thought trying to be a director was a massive jump I was completely unprepared for, but you’re never really prepared for anything, are you? I started a course on screenwriting. It went well. I wrote a script and sent it to some of my friends, they said it was great. Then nothing. I just stopped. University resumed and everything was just on hold. Now, 20 years old, I realize some things I thought back then were not wrong, but most of them were. I think I know I want to be a filmmaker and want to tell stories, whether it be through music, science, writing, or filmmaking – it’s always been the unending flame that has fueled my existence.

Of course, to make films you must watch films. As with every art form, you must know to master – knowing in this context being watching films once, twice, thrice, and multiple more times to catch visual, auditory, and written narrative techniques you could incorporate into developing your filmmaking style, which is a lifelong pursuit. So, I spend an unhealthy amount of time on Letterboxd creating lists, logging the films I watch, and increasing my watchlist count to a number I might never exhaust. This hunger to know more led me to Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish filmmaker and theater director who lived from 1918 to 2007 (A LONG LIFE). I watched a video essay on his use of close-ups, precise blocking and staging, and lighting to create tension and intimacy in his films. I found it very interesting and looked for some of his films to study. Persona, The Seventh Seal, Scenes From a Marriage, and Silence are some of his more popular films, but Autumn Sonata stood out to me due to its name, an extremely beautiful name by the way, and the narrative revolving around a dysfunctional relationship between a mother and her daughter.

Charlotte, the mother, grew up in a home where affection was not to be expressed, physically or emotionally. She got married to someone she didn’t love. She had three children, her two daughters, and her career as a composer. She loved composing as much as she loved herself. To her, love was standing in an auditorium and rendering a beautiful piece to a crowd for rapturous applause. Unfortunately, all this did was lay a path filled with dead relationships she tried forgetting about with numerous misters, but all coming to bite her back in ways she couldn’t imagine.

Eva, her first daughter, became the mother of the house at eight years old. She would console her father about her mother’s life choices, reassuring him that she loved him and would come back. Eva grew up having to provide love she didn’t have. By her adulthood, she had nothing left to express, but she could not shake off the evergreen enthusiasm to meet her mother again, sending numerous letters to almost no response, even sending another letter, to which she expected no response, at the end of the film.

Charlotte did eventually visit when her dearest lover died but even then, could not suppress her condescending nature. She just had to complain about Eva’s honest attempt to play a piano piece she had memorized because she knew Charlotte loved it, or complain about Eva and her husband, Viktor, being the caretaker of her disabled daughter, Elena, or talk down on their car, or ask Viktor about Eva’s and his love life, or claim that there was some elaborate scheme to embarrass her carefully drawn up by Eva and Viktor. Nothing was ever enough; that theme defined her character throughout the film’s runtime.

This gaping chasm, yet intertwined trauma, in the relationship between Charlotte and Eva, defines my twenty-year existence. It’s a mix of paying too much attention to chasing my goals and passion and being burdened by the painful reality of trauma expressing itself by paying too much attention. It’s always been a battle of empathy and apathy and I realize this is an extremely reductive way to treat these incredibly complex characters created by Ingmar, but my relation to these two characters is defined by this reductivity. In some way, my mind is Charlotte, and my heart is Eva. I want to enjoy the grandeur of accomplishment and fulfillment, but my heart longs for more – something less superficial; more human, more grounded. Something more lovely and homely. Something to comfort my grief for the death of my childhood, which I believe is a form of grief that we tend to dismiss except in very specific situations. Something to reassure me and make me feel loved. Something to write back. Something to hold on to that won’t disappear when I have a back injury, like Charlotte, or can’t think as clearly, or can’t write as well. Something larger than life yet smaller than it. Something that will make me finally feel noticed, appreciated, and free from the pressure of being the Nigerian golden child.

As Eva was the victim of Charlotte’s deep frustrations with life and her career, so is my heart a victim of my mind. My consciousness plays with me. It enjoys the pain years’ worth of self-doubt and self-hatred have created; self-hatred created by many things that are for a more personal write-up, a poem perhaps.

In any case, my dissonance stems from a deep yearning within my heart for sameness with my mind that cannot be achieved because I don’t think I want it to, it would invalidate all the pain I’ve garnered. It is in this way that my deeply personal admiration for this film began. I realized my short life has been a beautiful musical piece ending on a flat note, like sending a letter to a loved one knowing you won’t get a response.