Most of writer-director Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) is taken up by the blissfully happy period of the title, but he spends just enough time in its less-than-rosy aftermath to eventually render it haunting. Achieving something close to fantasy in life is possible, but it tends to come at a cost. For Summer with Monika’s main characters, reckless joy brings ruination.
Summer with Monika’s middle-class lovers, at the end of their teenage years, are Harry (Lars Ekborg) and, of course, Monika (Harriet Andersson), who meet cute at a café near the factory workplace where he’s regularly yelled at for his incompetence. (At her own middlingly paying job, Monika puts up with so much sexual harassment that she hardly flinches anymore when a male coworker touches her.) Both are romantics — though Monika is likelier to meet a sad movie with certifiable tears than an eye-rolling Harry — and both are desperate to leave their worlds behind. Their jobs are miserable, and so are their home lives. Harry lives with a father who’s become unbearably emotionally distant after his mom’s passing. Monika lives in a cramped apartment lorded over by an alcoholic, sometimes physically abusive father.
Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika.
Harry and Monika talk about how nice it would be to run away from everything. Then they actually are, taking a boat to the Stockholm Archipelago. They have no plans in mind for when they get there or when they get back home. Harry impetuously quits his job after getting in a fight with his constantly belittling boss, and Monika will only talk more and more during what will swell into an all-summer-long vacation of never going back.
The vacation is, at first, as idyllic as the pair had envisioned, all sun and sex. Ekborg and Andersson make for a lovely young couple: tanned and earthy and palpably ecstatic inside this existence where all they have to worry about is their love for each other. As a free spirit resistant to taming, Andersson is especially radiant, and you can tell in how she’s shot — she possesses an implacably magical quality even in scenes where her character is exasperatingly stubborn and selfish — how much love Bergman, with whom she was having an affair at the time, had for her. She ennobles the clichéd compliment of someone looking lit from within. The film as much celebrates Monika as the young woman who plays her.
Practicalities dull the reverie. The pair’s hunger pangs aren’t being adequately quieted by the various wild-mushroom dishes they prepare, to the point that Monika impulsively, and unsuccessfully, decides one evening that she’s going to steal from some people who’ve prepared a roast elsewhere on the island. Then Monika notices that she’s almost certainly pregnant. That revelation didn’t as much strike me as a sign of trouble than each person’s response to it. Harry pragmatically doesn’t hesitate before suggesting that the two go back home immediately to try to find work, save some money, and get married. Monika, though, says she wants to keep living like this, and you don’t detect anything in her voice implying she doesn’t wholeheartedly believe that. Who wouldn’t want this carefree summer to stretch eternally?
Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika.
Harry will ultimately win out. Bergman injects the darkness slowly, painfully. It’s a drip-drip familiar to anyone — not just when your new responsibilities become as quickly weighty as Harry’s and Monika’s — who’s struggled to reconcile how much crueler and unforgiving adult life is compared to the anything-is-possible optimism inherent in childhood. Bergman doesn’t moralize — seem to be punishing young characters who’d been shirking their responsibilities for simpler hedonistic pleasures — or depict Monika’s (spoiler alert) eventual betrayal with she-was-always-bad-news sexism. We sympathize with young people too naïve to understand how some consequences could be graver than they could imagine until they’re irreversible.
Summer with Monika’s story is couched in specificity, but the feeling it conclusively captures — yearning for one’s younger years, when so much felt possible, when life could largely go uncontaminated by the scary uncertainties of the future — twinges with universality. Love is precious, too often derailed by hard circumstances. You feel Bergman’s heart hurting for kids that don’t know better thrust into something exceeding their grasp. They long for this summer before it begins and after it ends.
Peterson Reviews 