Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika, 1952)

Ingmar Bergman

Sweden

96 min, black and white, Swedish (English subtitles)

This is not one of Bergman's strong films or even one of his mediocre ones. Summer with Monika is decidedly among his weakest. The film betrays its humble origins as a simple idea suggested to Bergman by someone else and it never manages to make a profound statement despite its sincere attempts to do so.

The plot can be summarized with a couple of sentences. A young boy meets a young girl at a cafe. They (seem to) fall in love but their cinematic trysts are rudely interrupted when (i) her ex-boyfriend (??) sucker punches her current one, but, more importantly (ii) when her drunken dad raises his voice at her. In a fit of teenage angst she leaves home and forces her boyfriend guy to go off with her and live on a boat. They spend what can only be described as long and boring summer together until they are reduced to eating mushrooms. She gets pregnant (don't they all?) and they go back to make a happy family. They don't and they fail. She leaves.

I am only guessing when I say that Bergman seems to have wanted to make a story about youth, love, romance, and responsibility, when innocence is confronted by the ugliness of the real world, and when the initial thrill wears off to expose a dull and debilitating routine that is the married life in all his work. He was not a happy camper.

What he succeeded in doing, however, was to show how two irresponsible and not very bright people can manage to screw up their lives because of completely misguided emotions. It is clear that Monika (Harriet Andersson) does not love Harry (Lars Ekborg) despite all her protestations of undying tenderness. Her feelings are celluloid, and her romanticism is the bland, empty, and utterly ephemeral Hollywood type. She cries at the movies during a particularly touching love scene while Harry yawns. She reenacts the kiss later on startling him with her straightforwardness.

Yet Harry is the more romantic of the two. Although he will not shed a tasteless tear on an imaginary drama, he is ready to make all required sacrifices to ensure that their relationship will endure. He readily abandons home (and, in a fit of inspired teenage thanklessness, his sick father), scurries off with his wanton girlfriend to uninhabited beaches, and even participates in the theft plot, albeit not too successfully. When she reveals her pregnancy, rather matter of factly, of course, he is determined to stand by her and make a solid family. All this in contrast to Monika's carefree attitude that seems to regard everyone and everything as a source of amusement for her.

She is truly unattractive as a personality. Forget about stupid and insensitive. Forget about her pretensions and her being full of herself. She wants to have fun but she does not really know how except to do things that are verbotten, and she sucks at that too. She does not know how to repay kindness and finally becomes bored with the struggle to make a living. She cannot stand her own child, and she begins a completely pointless affair with her ex just, it seems, to relieve her dull existence and, as a bonus, spite her husband and make his life miserable.

For all the hardships that his work and studies cause him, he is happy because he is working and because his work is holding his family together. But that is not enough for her, and, since she's never really loved him beyond imitating on-camera relationships that last but ninety minutes and never show what happens after the "happily ever after" conclusion, she does the only thing she knows how to do: Lies on her back and spreads her legs.

For all the venomous accusations that I just leveled at Monika, I think Bergman did not really intend to make her the monster that she came out to be. Or maybe he did? With a director like him one can never be sure. It is significant that all nature shots always depict a cloudy and menacing sky, and even such a pleasurable event as a boat ride is made to look ominous as the two young "lovers" sail into the uninviting city. Still, for all his goodness, Harry seems to be a vulnerable lad who is misled by his own excessive fondness for the wench, who, as it happens to all good men, ends up being his pain and downfall because of her inconstancy and her shamelessness. I must say that some may find it refreshing and rebeliously attractive.

I did not appreciate Bergman chickening out at the end and showing Harry seemingly happy with his baby after Monika left them. Although he seems to have come full circle, emphasized by showing him in front of the very cafe where he met her, I would have preferred a much darker ending that would have been closer to reality.

January 2, 2003