When you're a prolific young filmmaker churning out two films each year without pause for breath, you're bound to let things slip every now and then. This appears to be what happened to Ingmar Bergman when he made Summer with Monika . Critics harp on about how his early work is extraordinarily good and deserves to be rediscovered – while this is true for some of it (particularly the sublime To Joy ), it's not true for Summer with Monika, which is painfully bad in places.
Two young lovers (Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg) leave their difficult lives behind them and embark on a boat trip through the Stockholm archipelago. They're looking for independence, making ends meet, and so forth. To begin with they're at one with nature and the elements, but the honeymoon soon ends, Monika is impregnated, and everything goes sour in the relationship. For a story line as monotonous as this, the film required strength from the actors. It gets none. The acting is poor. The editors are uncredited, perhaps because they didn't edit anything much. One wonders if Bergman said 'take two' on any occasion during the shoot, besides one instance where he had to replace some damaged material.
The characters are not easy to warm to. For a 21st century audience, this is partly because we're watching stuffy 50s Stockholm stereotypes (which Bergman had intended), but mostly because Monika shows all the hallmarks of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Whether Bergman intended this is not clear, but while melodrama can be entertaining on film, this is an example of the contrary. Monika is a headache to watch, every self-obsessed tantrum tempting you to press 'eject' on your remote. This nonsense is far too annoying for the film to invoke sympathy for her well-adjusted accommodating boyfriend Harry.
Having said all this, the film does have its moments: a little well-timed (if misplaced) farce and some beautiful nature shots here and there. The best of these should have been spliced together to make a short. In its entirety, the film has a skeleton too feeble to support the uneven folds of narrative flesh hanging off it.
Perhaps the film has a message. Maybe it teaches teenagers not to rush into adulthood, to take things at a relaxed pace. Big deal. From the evidence of the director's later work, much of it deserving of the label 'genius', it would appear that this early film more importantly taught Bergman not to rush his filmmaking.
Copyright © Robert Hayward 2002-2005
Rating:
2.0 / 5
(1 vote)
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