[ AS ALWAYS, SPOILERS ABOUND ]

Ingmar Bergman sure loves him a Summer theme! Where To Joy and Summer Interlude depict tragedy, Summer with Monika (1953) gives us folly. Folly of youth, perhaps, but I think Monika’s folly transcends her age: it’s in her character, not her stage of life. For Harry, yes, it’s a stage: he grows up in the end. But Monika, she’s just stuck where she is.

A brief summary. Young couple (Harry and Monika, both around 18) consorts freely and gaily until, you guessed it, Nature hits the buzzer and a child floats up from the primordial soup. Monika, who would rather be a “Dream Girl” (the name of her favorite American movie, one that simply bores Harry) neglects to bond with the child, shrugs off the shackles of family life, and flies away, leaving Harry to raise the child. Of course, that’s where the movie ends, but surely not the story. She’ll be back! I guarantee it! She’ll hop in and out of Harry and the child’s life at her whim for years…. Maybe I’m identifying too closely with some of these films, but DAMN.

Of course, the point of the film is to highlight the Edenic happiness Harry and Monika experience when they escape from the peonage of Civilization and make their way by boat to the summer paradise of an island off the coast of Sweden. There’s a wonderful, long montage sequence of their expedition out through a labyrinth of artificial waterways confined and bounded by a seemingly infinite tangle of bridges and structures; it all gives way to gorgeous vistas of open water and the natural splendor of the island they land on. The relief is palpable when you get to the island, and these children frolic without a single care or worry. Incredible. At this stage of my life, I can’t imagine feeling this way. You’d simply have to be rich, and I guess they are rich: rich with Nature. Summer is the easy season, after all, and they take full advantage. When they return to the city, we are given another lengthy and effective sequence of nature giving way to oppressive (and majestic) urban architecture. Tarkovsky does a similar thing in Solaris (1972)—on roads instead of water—and I can’t help but wonder whether he was quoting this film.

We are treated to some lovely black and white nudity (hers, of course), and we don’t have to feel like voyeurs because it’s Harry who’s looking at her, you see. We’re just seeing what Harry sees. If his loving eyeballs weren’t present on the scene taking in all her feminine glories along with us, then those same exact shots of Monika’s naked body would be “pornography.” Isn’t it amazing, the power of a little narrative context? Of course, this was 1953, when that was still possible. I think what these early films showcasing human sensual experience couldn’t have anticipated was home video. These fleeting glimpses of youthful bodies within the embrace of a complex story and fleshed out characters are perfectly “tasteful,” but home video is able to strip all that context away at the whim of whatever “preevert” happens to be in control of the remote. He can just pause it there, and Monika is transformed into nothing more than an image to summon ejaculation. Indeed, now with digital video, that preevert can take it to the next level and simply extract the “highlights” for online distribution to others who may not even know what film the images come from! Thus, “tasteful,” non-pornographic film imagery is no longer possible, and Summer with Monika itself may be seen as a kind of Filmic Eden to which return is forbidden now that we have eaten of the fruit of Knowledge of Digital Video.

I don’t know if Bergman has any politics, per se, but you could certainly view this film as an anti-Capitalist screed, the way the young fools are ridiculously exploited, mistreated, and dehumanized by their bosses and co-workers, all of whom collaborate to constantly crack the economic whips and keep each other in line. The bleak world created by this system is on full display in the grim montage of industrial cityscape that opens the film. Contrast that with the section in Paradise: we spend a full third of the runtime hanging out in the loveliest summer landscapes and seashores, wallowing nude and disporting playfully in every pose and posture available to the human form… only to be compelled by pregnancy and poverty to return to the mean confinement of the market-driven world, where Harry not only has to devote the bulk of his time and energy to filling up some rich asshole’s treasure trunk, but also has to invest his remaining personal resources in night classes if he wishes to sustain any hope of advancing his economic condition beyond meek subsistence. You can’t blame Monika for wanting to escape all that, I guess! On the other hand… you can.

I have to take note of a moment in which Monika breaks the fourth wall. It’s not even that common nowadays, but back then, it must have been a real shocker! (Certainly was to me.) She’s partying hard with her fella (not Harry), and leans back plucking tobacco off her tongue… then, whammo, turns her gaze suddenly into the camera, the lighting shifts dramatically (you can see Bergman’s theater background here), her eyes darken and her expression hollows out, her smug hedonism softens into a moment of self-awareness, an acknowledgement of the emptiness of her desires, the futility of her “ambitions,” such as they are, to infinite pleasure and escapism…. It’s her Confession, I think. She confesses to us, the audience, because she can’t even confess it to herself. Without a camera to look into, where would she look? A mirror? Ha! A mirror only shows beauty, not truth, everyone knows that! You need an audience for truth, and you yourself can’t be that audience. But that’s probably a discussion for another movie….

Speaking of mirrors, one is employed to great effect in the final shot, demonstrating precisely the point I just made. Harry, holding the baby for whom he’s now solely responsible, peers into a mirror and sees a montage of memories (because Bergman knows that consciousness collapses time) of Monika cavorting naked in their Eden, looking as fresh and sexy as a young woman can, and he smiles wistfully and wanders off into the cold night; regardless of the hell Monika has put him through, he can’t help but romanticize their relationship. Which is to say, he sees beauty, not truth. Is that what love is? Well, this IS where the credits roll… so I guess fucking so!