Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

oOoBarracuda For years I've put off a number of other film projects because I hadn't watched Ingmar Bergman's filmography. Ingmar Bergman has always been the cinematic powerhouse I've most admired despite only seeing one of his films. I struggled with prioritizing other film projects knowing I had nearly all of Bergman's filmography to discover. After finally doing my recent deep-dive into Woody Allen's filmography, and seeing how influential Ingmar Bergman was to Woody Allen, I decided to finally schedule a retrospective of Bergman's films. I actually started this project with Summer with Monika because it was the first Bergman film that Woody Allen saw. Perhaps not the best entry point to Ingmar Bergman, Summer with Monika was a gorgeous film with a brilliant exploration of a relationship and a raw portrait of the gamut run as emotions develop.Harry Lund (Lars Ekborg) is a 19-year-old young man who works a job he is unsatisfied with, yet, committed to as a means of taking care of himself and his sickly father. One day before work, Harry goes to a cafe before work where he meets Monika Eriksson (Harriet Andersson). Monika is a 17-year-old dreamer who imagines a life where she can leave her job as a stockroom worker and spend her days lounging with a man devoted to her by her side. Monika is immature and makes reckless decisions such as leaving her job without any alternative source of income lined up. Desperate to leave her parents home where abuse and alcohol abuse are commonplace, Monika sees a stable future with Harry. Despite their juvenility, the two fall in love determined to make their relationship last. Smitten with each other, Harry and Monika spend all their time together finding it difficult to leave one another culminating in Harry finally getting fired from/quitting his job due to his constant tardiness. When Monika's home life becomes too much for her to return to, Harry becomes responsible for taking care of Monika, as she is still without a job. Due to their young age and position in life, the two run away together, using Harry's father's boat, to the countryside. At first, their departure from the rest of the world is blissful, all the two have to worry about is being carefree and spending time with each other. Real world problems begin to interrupt their idyllic adventure as their joblessness forces them to steal for food in order to survive. In hopes of getting their lives back on track, they decide to return to the city, marry, and eventually have a child together. Unfortunately for them, their relationship is in for suffering ahead that they couldn't have anticipated.I was floored by the way Bergman filmed people. One of my favorite filmmakers is Francois Truffaut, so I am definitely partial to humanist filmmakers. I was mesmerized by the tender way Bergman focused on his principles. The close-ups on the faces of Monika and Harry are integral to revealing the development of their relationship. Maybe we're not all floating aimlessly along the sea, but we've all experienced the many stages of a relationship. From the initial "love at first sight" experienced when you just can't get enough of your new partner, to the dying down of excitement in a relationship, these are all aspects of a relationship familiar to anyone that has ever been in love. The way Bergman bookended Monika lighting her cigarette act as a perfect reflection of their union. After their initial meeting in the cafe, Harry nervously attempts multiple times, to light Monika's cigarette, failing each time as his attention has shifted to the beautiful young girl too much to concentrate on anything else. In the final minutes of the film, Monika hastily lights her own cigarette, full of disdain and regret, visibly distancing herself from her now husband. The two scenes illustrate the birth and subsequent death of love in a subtle yet powerful way. The emotion-filled shots, the gorgeous cinematography, and the powerful subtlety leave me greatly looking forward to discovering more of Ingmar Bergman.

avik-basu1889 For a film which was released in 1953, 'Summer with Monika' has some scenes that are pretty risqué. Bergman uses some eroticism to decorate the intensity of the young love that blossoms between Monika and Harry. This is at its core a coming-of-age film, specially from Harry's point of view. Two youngsters of contrasting attitudes, contrasting backgrounds and contrasting aspirations get attracted to each other and we witness their innocent, yet intensely passionate love affair. They leave the civilisation of the city behind and start exploring life in a new way together in the midst of the wilderness of the country isolated from the general population.However as it invariably happens, life refuses to allow these youngsters an extended spell of joy and somewhat inevitably, worldly realism starts to eat into romanticism. But as happens with every unhappy reality, this proves to be a learning experience for Harry and it ends up learning something about himself, about others and about life. Some viewers might opine that Bergman goes a little overboard and somewhat vilifies Monika a bit too much, but I think it is a depiction of the reality that awaits everyone who embarks on a journey which requires maturity while still being immature.'Summer with Monika' includes some of the quintessential Bergman elements like long takes, extended extreme close-ups to underline internal conflict or emotional shift, lingering shots of nature, symbolism, etc. However the metaphors get a bit too on-the-nose at times here. Specially the character of Lelle appears abruptly on multiple occasions without any logic, just to act as a metaphor which is somewhat off-putting.Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg are really good as Monika and Harry respectively. They make their characters as well as their relationship believable and passionate which makes us root for the 'happily ever-after'.'Summer with Monika' is certainly not one of Bergman's best films. But it does contain some of the masterful touches that Bergman would polish even further to make numerous masterpieces. But even then, I think 'Summer with Monika' deserves to be seen as an early piece of work from one of the masters that has something to say about the brutality of life.

Robert J. Maxwell It must be agonizing to be deeply in love with someone who feels only a casual and momentary attraction to you. Better, the object of all that affection should be completely indifferent, and still better if the other person hates your guts. But that, along with a lot of multi-layered symbolism is what the movie is all about.But this is 1953 and it would be a mistake to confuse "Summer With Monica" with Ingmar Bergman's later stuff, like "Scenes From A Marriage," by which time he'd gotten all minimalist and spiritual. In "Scenes From A Marriage," a man and wife talk for two hours in a single room. The Big Reveal leads to one or the other raising his or her eyebrows. I don't remember. I've done my best to forget. My wife dragged me to it and after a few minutes of fierce boredom I began to doze off the way I do at the opera. I haven't looked but I'd be surprised if "Scenes From A Marriage" didn't get a statistically significant better approval rating from women than men.Anyway, compared to that, "Summer With Monica" looks like a John Wayne Western from the 1930s. Lots of action. The two lovers, Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson are having a miserable time in the city. He's nineteen and has no aim in life. She's eighteen and lives in a cramped apartment with her drunken father and a horde of squalling brothers and sisters. They run off and spend the summer together on Lars' small boat, roaming the rustic waterways, swimming naked, getting drunk, eating wild mushrooms, and spending nights devoted to the delicacies of Venus. She gets pregnant. (It was a shocker in its time and shown only in art houses.) As summer draws to a close they return to the city, where Lars finds a satisfying job and Andersson remains the narcissistic, self-indulgent slob she was during the summer. And worse. When he returns early from a job, he finds her in bed with another man. She spitefully tells Lars that she loved the guy she was sleeping with.I don't want to go on about the plot except to emphasize that it moves very quickly. Lars' acting is okay. He's an earnest young man who takes the short Scandinavian summer off when the Minnesingers arrive and the cuckoo sings. He's all right but Andersson's is a compelling character and she is an enthralling actress. If you doubt it, watch the scene in Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly" when her hallucinated vision of God turns into a giant spider.Bergman's direction is stylistically innovative but in a curiously quiet way that doesn't draw much attention to itself. At times, it can only be described as "artistic." I don't just mean the picture postcard compositions of fields of waving reeds, or the liquid reflection of the sun breaking into multiple scintillating globes before coalescing again as the ripples pass, or the black-and-white rainbow.The ugliness is turned into beauty too, like a shot of the stark, black steel girders of a bridge that the lovers camp under. And there is one shot that simply would never have occurred to any American director of the period. Lars leaves on a business trip after handing her some money to pay the month's rent. Instead, Andersson gussies up in front of the mirror and sits in a bar. The camera holds for an outrageously long time on her stunning face, turned halfway towards the lens, assessing the audience out of the sides of her eyes, her sensuous lips ready for business.You know, the summers are brief, like life, Bergman seems to be telling us. Better enjoy them while we can, before we have to buckle down to the business of getting along for eternity.

pontifikator SPOILERS throughout.One of the problems with reviewing "Summer with Monika" almost 60 years after its release is that it's breathtaking originality has become a part of our film lexicon. "Summer with Monika" has many scenes which are familiar now to us but which were startlingly new in 1953, breaking rules with the full intention of shattering them. For starters, let's look at Monika looking at the camera. The convention was for the cast never to acknowledge the presence of the camera, leaving the audience to believe it wasn't there, that the audience was directly watching and experiencing the scenes projected on the silver screen. If you've been watching the movie, the context here is very disturbing, and Monika's frank gaze at you, directly at you the viewer, is both disturbing and challenging. Monika the character is breaking the rules by committing adultery, and she's challenging you to take her to task. She's flouting the rules openly, and she's not going to take your objections. And Bergman is breaking the rules by having his character stare out at you in confrontation and in conspiracy with his rule- breaking. Bergman is challenging you directly to acknowledge the wrongful deeds of his character yet still accept her as a human being. "Yes, Monika has done this; so what?"Adding to the stare is Bergman's use of music. It's sprightly jazz, bright, fast, and happy. However, as Monika's stare continues and unsettles us, the music fades a little and we become aware of a humming sound; something sours in the sound of the jazz. Underneath the freedom of the drums and clarinet, something lurks that suggests that all is not so happy after all. This had never been done before. When Fosse did it in "Cabaret" twenty years later no one was shocked; the stare into the camera with souring music has become a part of our vocabulary. Woody Allen mentions Bergman often, and he mentions seeing "Summer with Monika" in his late teens and how it affected him in an interview on YouTube. It's sad to say, but Bergman's freshness in 1953 had become our cliché only twenty years later."Summer with Monika" stars Harriet Andersson in the title role and Lars Ekborg as Harry, Monika's lover for a summer. Monika is a curvaceous 18-year-old, and Lars is 20, and they meet in a coffee house, two loose ships adrift the night. Monika is smitten by Lars because he doesn't put his hands all over her the way the other guys do; she sees him as sweet. Both have jobs they hate, home lives that are stultifying, and neither has much money. They decide to run away. Harry's father has a boat, so they take it for the summer and visit the islands around their native town of Stockholm. They challenge the status quo, exclaiming that they'll never knuckle under to the grind of everyday life like all the grownups have. During their summer of love, they fight occasionally but always make up, they live for the present, and the trip seems romantic without many struggles or tribulations. They enjoy freedom, sun, and each other. Of course, they run out of money, and they're reduced to scavenging mushrooms and stealing food from farmers. And Monika becomes pregnant. They talk about how they'll be different from their parents, Harry will get a job, Monika will stay at home and raise little Harry, Jr., and they'll still go out and dance and see movies. Harry actually grows up, and we are impressed with his new-found maturity as little Monika's father (it was a girl). He gets a job, goes to school at night and studies to get ahead at work. We see from a scene between his fellow workers that he's changed completely from the slacker he was at the beginning of the movie, and his workers recommend him for advancement. Monika, however, is dissatisfied. Harry is spending his time and energies at work and at school and not enough money on her. She buys a new suit for herself instead of paying the rent. Harry comes home a day early from an extended work trip and finds Monika in bed with his rival from before that summer with Monika.One of the things I like about many Swedish films is the "wrap around." In "The Emigrants," directed by Jan Troell, Max von Sydow plays an emigrant to America who goes to seek the wilderness. At the beginning of the film, he finds his wilderness, and we see him falling asleep alone in a forest to the sound of loons. At the end of the film, we hear the sound of axes ringing as his fellow villagers are using them to chop down the trees and build cabins -- the wilderness-seekers have destroyed it forever by their very act of moving there.In "Summer with Monika," our wrap around starts with Monika before she meets Harry staring into a mirror as a few drunks stagger around in the reflected background, and Monika adjusts her beret to make herself more becoming. At the end, we have the same mirror and the same drunks, but Harry is holding his infant daughter and he's become his father -- nothing has changed despite his summer with Monika other than the grind continues in the new generation. But Harry's stare into the camera isn't the challenge that we had from Monika. Harry's stare is his acknowledgement that he's his dreams are shattered, that he has become a part of the rat- race. Harry lost.