PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Vihren Mitev Love story perfectly told. Life story perfectly told.First of all I was angry watching the to lovers being enormously happy. It was so unreal and idealistic that I said to myself - you can see this only in movies. The two lovers were talking the strange language of love that makes them fool around and boost. That makes them feel the need to show off and to be something more. That naive language of their naive youth.Suddenly this romantic cloud was blown away and this movie become more realistic, lifely realistic. Yeah, it was trivial but told in Bergman's way it was also very beautiful and true. It showed the change that we all live trough the language that is familiar but we do not speak any more, the things in life and the life caught in the walls of self preservation, senselessness and absurd where the only one escape is the ultimate love - the only reality.http://vihrenmitevmovies.blogspot.com/

TheLittleSongbird Actually there is nothing wrong with Summer Interlude as such, it's just that I don't think it is quite on the same level as Ingmar Bergman's very best. Bergman's direction is as always superb. The cinematography positively shimmers, and the images of the sunny Swedish countryside are beautiful to look at. The writing is thought-provoking, affecting in its honesty and sweet in how it deals with the romantic elements. The story still has the dramatic intensity and structural complexity that helps to form the best of Bergman's films. The two lead characters are touching and are likable, Marie being world-weary and Henrik being timid. The acting helps to reflect that, especially Maj-Britt Nilsson whose performance is so sensitive that you wonder why she wasn't in more after this and Secrets of Women. Birger Malmsten is not quite in the same league but gives a well-contrasted performance still. All in all, a lovely film if not quite among Bergman's very best movies. 9/10 Bethany Cox

sol- Bergman's films are always interesting to look at, and this one is no exception. Some of the film's best visuals include a bleak white sky that only a black silhouette of the protagonist can be made out walking against, and a couple of excellent montages: one being the opening shots of slight movements in clouds, in a river and of rubbish on a footpath; the other being a montage of steam, skies and water as a boat sails along. Bergman also pays a lot of attention to sound here too, and in particular there is something rhythmic about the chugging boat sounds, and these sounds can be heard at times throughout the film even when the boat is not visible on screen. Silence, such as at the doctor's office, is also distributed well throughout.The directing work in this early Bergman film is on par with some of his best direction. His screenplay is however well below par. It is one of his least challenging scripts - a simple tale of love between two young persons with none of the philosophy or analysis about how human beings function that make most of his films so interesting. It is well made, but often nothing more than sentimental fluff. The stop animation work is an awkward inclusion too and the film is full of unimportant events, such as the ups and downs of the ballet, that really have absolutely nothing to do with the story at hand. It is not one of Bergman's best films by far, but still a good sign of things to come from him, and fairly pleasant viewing. It is sort of similar to 'Wild Strawberries', and therefore it is rather amusing to hear the main character ask her lover whether he wants to pick some wild strawberries with her!

jandesimpson Among outstanding film directors there are those who crash in with debut features that show something of the full extent of their talent (Satyajit Ray with "Pather Panchali", Neil Jordan with "Angel" and of course Orson Welles with "Citizen Kane") and those like Ingmar Bergman who creep into the scene with films that are little less than mediocre, but who develop slowly, almost unobtrusively, giving only occasional hints of the glories to come. Bergman first came to notice as the proficient scriptwriter for Alf Sjoberg's "Hets", a 1944 shocker with echos of "The Blue Angel". Sjoberg's direction is impressive with much use of expressionist shadows and angles. The strange thing about Bergman's directional debut, "Kris", two years later is what little he appeared to have absorbed from his mentor. "Kris" is a very two dimensional work that could have been made by almost anyone. This was followed by several similar apprentice works which again give very little indication of what was to come. I would date the emergence of the original Bergman voice from the appearance of "Summer Interlude" in 1951. Although on the surface this appears to be a very conventional tale of an idyllic romance cut short by a tragic twist of fate, the sort of youth/love/death cocktail that was the mainstay of so much Hollywood drama ("Kings Row", "Love Story" and "Dead Poets Society"), the treatment is often very personal in a way that we can almost feel an innate artist struggling to express something beyond the superficial. It opens with a visually stunning series of still-life shots of the sort that Ozu always inserted between each short dramatic scene. We immediately feel this is a film that is demanding to be taken seriously. When the ballerina heroine takes a boat to the archipelago where thirteen years before she met the young man who was to become the love of her life, memory is unleashed and we relive in flashbacks her past happiness. Sometimes Bergman is in complete control of his material as when the ballerina leaves the boat and uneasy memories seem reflected in the sound of the wind and there is a silent encounter with a mysterious elderly woman whose path almost touches hers - a device he was to use to even more chilling effect years later when Liv Ullmann passes an elderly lady in the corridor to an apartment flat in "Face to Face". In other places his command is less certain and borders on cliché - when the doomed young man speaks of his premonition of something dark, and indeed the shot of a black cloud a moment after the accident that is to prove fatal. Bergman also makes the mistake of sometimes cluttering the narrative with supporting characters which add very little to the forward flow - the rather tiresome behind the scenes workers at the theatre. Although the film is a romantic tragedy it differs from the works of his central period in the way it comes to terms with life's misfortunes. The ballerina learns from her memories that her life has a continuation, that it is still possible to forge new relationships. Bergman was to regain something of this confident belief in the worthwhile qualities of life in later works like "Cries and Whispers" and "Fanny and Alexander" but not until he had become resigned to rather than angered by God's silence. It is perhaps significant that in "Summer Interlude", where he had not quite sorted out his responses to life or the medium in which he was working, the most powerful scene of all is where the ballerina rails at God's silence after her lover has been taken from her and craves for the opportunity to spit at God should he appear. There is not a single scene that expresses anything like this that I can recall in Hollywood drama. It indicates more clearly than anything else in Bergman's output up to this point the path he was about to take in expressing his dark vision of the world, one in which the conventions of commercial cinema were to have no place.