Did you dig Moonrise Kingdom but wished that its Andersonian whimsy could've been replaced by the steely nordic gaze of Ingmar Bergman? Then brothers and sisters, have I got a movie for you.I'm being overly reductive, but that's just because Summer With Monika caught me completely unawares. Unfairly categorized as an exercise in cheap eroticism (check the original English title, Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl!), it's actually a moving look at that wonderful, horrible time of our lives where we mature much faster sexually than emotionally. It's also a movie where the director's real-life love for his lead actress creates some tricky conflicts of interest with the film's narrative, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.Harry and Monika (Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson) are a couple of working-class Stockholm teenagers for whom the world doesn't offer much respite. Harry, the sheltered dreamer, proves the perfect counterpoint to Monika's wild passion. Madly in love (even though neither of them really knows what that means) and tired of their workaday lives, they steal a boat and set off for the secluded beaches of the Swedish archipelago. Once there, they spend together the sort of idyllic, erotic summer that teenagers always dream about. In the hands of any other director, their story might play out as a few months of passion cut short when reality suddenly starts to creep into their paradise and then the tale is over. However, Bergman sees his story through to the end of the line, where our characters eventually return home and are forced to deal with the consequences of their decidedly adult behavior.Reading this description, you may think that this film is equally concerned with Harry as with Monika, but take a look at the title again. This is Monika's movie, and in Harriet Andersson, Bergman found his muse (or at least one of them). She portrays Monika as the lusty, uninhibited embodiment of the director's own id, and it's pretty clear early on that Bergman is head over heels (just look at the way he shoots her sunbathing on the deck of the boat; you can sense Bergman slathering somewhere off-camera, maybe with one of those aaah-OOOOO-ga sound effects). And, well, that's when the problems start to arise. Bergman seems to be trying to make a film about Monika's indomitable free spirit and her unwillingness to bend to the confines of middle-class propriety, but it's kind of hard to work around the fact that she's a petulant little shit. No, she doesn't submit herself to the mores of the Swedish patriarchy and there's something laudable in that, but she's also selfish, self-destructive, and needlessly callous towards someone who cares for her. However, you couldn't really notice these flaws by the way Bergman's camera fawns all over her. This leads to a weird dichotomy between the character's personality and the director's adoration of the actress. It's one thing for Bergman the person to lionize a woman with whom he's madly in love, but quite another for Bergman the director to plead for our sympathies towards a character who doesn't necessarily deserve it.Still, much of this film strikes a perfect chord. Bergman seems to have been influenced by the Italian neo-realists much more here than in subsequent films, as most of his compositions are relatively plain and free of his usual embellishments. In doing so, he allows the story of Harry and Monika to speak for itself, and it's a decision that I heartily endorse. There's also the emotional honesty that we've come to expect from a Bergman film, and he could generate empathy like few others. In the earliest scenes of the film I found myself thinking "oh God, I wish I could be a teenager in love again." By the end I was shaking my head in relief and saying "thank God I'm not a teenager in love anymore." I can't think of another director who could pull off such a reversal so successfully.So yeah, Summer With Monika is the damnedest movie. It gets so many things right (its tone, its pathos), but its problem with the way it handles Andersson means that I can't quite lift it into the Bergman pantheon. Of course, even a Bergman film that falls short of the mark is still better than just about anything else that you're ever going to see.
