Summer with Monika begins with the bustle of the city of Stockholm, where the inlets of the Baltic Sea split up its landmasses into a vast and thriving archipelago. The establishing shots and the exterior cutaways in this film are superb, lending to the atmosphere the lucid and palpable vibrancy of a city already on its way toward international stature, and they inform every aspect of the story itself and its characters. Stockholm has rarely felt more alive than in this film by Ingmar Bergman.
It is the story of two lovers living in the city and working dead-end jobs, both of them as low-level stockroom clerks harried by their superiors and co-workers. They meet one afternoon and hit it off, and as their relationship develops, they one day decide to flee the city, taking the boy’s father’s boat to the many islands of the Stockholm archipelago. They while away the summer moving from one to another of these, the girl gets pregnant, and their relationship, which was built on uneven passions and unspoken disdain for the trappings of their no-good-rotten lives as working-class drudges, starts to deteriorate once they return.
A simple story arc frames a more complex and substantial characterization that digs into the differences that at first seem to be those of personality, but then become unbridgeable differences of character leading to the failure of the relationship. Played by Harriet Andersson, for whom Ingmar Bergman intended this film as an early talent-showcase, Monika is young and daring, voluptuous, and so uninhibited that in many scenes she often seems downright feral, like a tiger cub weaned too young from the teat; on the other hand, Harry Lund, played by Lars Ekborg, is an indrawn young man swept off his feet by this savage and exciting plaything, so that throughout their brief affair Monika leads him by the nose as he follows obligingly, fascinated and slightly tentative, like a sailor to his siren.
There is in the daring nudity and the pert, animalistic vigor of its young actress the scent of provocation, as though Summer with Monika were siding with its female rebel against the more conservative and traditionalist 1950s—but the more outstanding features of the film are its attention to the details of character, and its thorough treatment of the city and the amphibian environment that seems like a way of life. I get from Summer with Monika, an early Bergman success, a strong whiff of this life and an indelible depiction of the city.
The many daring hallmarks for which it has a salacious reputation are just the minor addenda to the whole; like the shot in which Monika breaks the “fourth wall” of the cinema, staring with her luscious pertness and daring us to impugn her actions, the many delightful details of the film gain by what has gone before, by what has contributed to the more lucid and beautiful shots that stay with us. Monika is a chaotic burden by the end, no one can doubt that—but what a burden! Even the cuckolded Harry cannot avoid dwelling on these moments, which seem to stand defiantly alone in time.
