Summer Interlude (1951)/Summer With Monika
(1953/Ingmar Bergman/Criterion Blu-rays)
Picture:
A Sound: B+ Extras: D/B+ Films: A
Too often exciting, controversial, or subversive films
that inspire new modes of creation and viewership become, after decades of
adoring adulation and intertextual quotation, white elephants bloated by their
reputations. Ingmar Bergman's films have
certainly befallen this fate. The Seventh Seal, for example, has been
so quoted, parodied, and picked clean that it's nearly impossible to watch
today solely for its beauty and solemnity — we're too busy ticking off moments
of pop culture metastasization.
Bergman's
Summer Interlude, from 1951, and Summer with Monika, from 1953, were
turning points for the filmmaker that earned their cineaste bonafides by doing
nothing less than inspiring the French New Wave. (In 1958, Jean-Luc Godard, writing in the
publication Arts, called Ingmar Bergman's 1951 film Summer Interlude "the most beautiful of films.") But
unlike Important films such as The
Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries,
Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika aren't as well known
and, for far too long, have been unavailable or unseen in their original cuts.
(In the U.S.,
Monika has been primarily known for
its '50s grindhouse re-edit, Monika, the
Story of a Bad Girl!, courtesy of exploitation master Kroger Babb.) But in late May, the Criterion Collection
released the films in excellent, unadulterated Blu-Ray presentations. Watching them now, with 60 years of cinematic history
between viewer and films, is like taking two hits of pure oxygen. You're left
rejuvenated and euphoric by their beauty and daring and wide eyed by the scope
of their influence, not only on the New Wave but on an entire generation of
filmmaking.
Of the
two, Summer with Monika is the most
apparently influential. Its tale of two
young Swedes, Harry (Harriet Andersson) and Monika (Lars Ekborg), who escape
post-war Stockholm
and their hardscrabble working lives for an uninhibited summer on the archipelago,
only to have their idyll punctured by natural, urban, and biological realities,
is punctuated by perhaps the most famous 30 seconds in cinema. Monika,
who is cheating on her husband and shirking her responsibilities as a mother,
flirts lewdly with a complete stranger in a club when she lights her cigarette,
turns, and stares directly at the audience for half a minute.
This act
of defiance — Monika challenging us to judge her, Bergman challenging the
cinematic establishment to stop him — was a signal moment for filmmakers like
Godard and Francois Truffaut. The fourth
wall was down and anything was possible. Godard directly references this shot
in Breathless, and the spirit of it (and Monika) permeates many of the early
New Wave films. Indeed, Summer with Monika feels like a
blueprint for the New Wave, and Godard's films especially. Monika's energy
anticipates Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie
and Brigitte Bardot in Contempt (see
most of these titles reviewed elsewhere on this site) Monika and Harry's love-on-the-run
affair is a precursor to Pierrot le fou
(as well as Wes Anderson’s Moonrise
Kingdom, itself a product of New Wave influence), and the urban domestic
hell that dictates the lovers' lives resounds in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.
Summer Interlude lacks Monika's
moment-that-launched-a-revolution, which in part has allowed Monika to subsume
Interlude in a discussion of Bergman's films, but it is no less influential. Its story of a doomed summer romance between
aspiring dancer Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) and unworldly student Henrik (Birger Malmsten),
told in flashback by an older, world-weary Marie, is perhaps more conventional
but distinguished by Bergman's daring direction (seemingly influenced by Powell
and Pressburger's The Red Shoes). A
shot of older Marie in close up with half of her face cut off by the right side
of the screen points the way to Vertigo,
while the modernist misé-en-scene of the dance numbers and the dislocation of
characters in relationship to one another anticipate Last Year at Marienbad (out in an exceptional Blu-ray from
Criterion). Then there's the
proto-Bergman on display: A chess game between a priest and a dying woman
where, the priest says, death feels present; long shots of silhouettes on the
horizon; a deep reservoir of existentialism; the secret life of the theater.
Bergman
lays the foundation for his later triumphs in Summer Interlude, and in that way it's a film that sketches out the
parameters of his acclaimed career. (According to the Criterion notes, Bergman
considered this film a creative turning point.) But it's more than a dry run — of his future
work, or of Monika. The film is
simple, perhaps, when viewed today, but it's beauty is complex and staggering.
Moments in the Stockholm ballet theater recall Degas' celebration of dancers —
one shot, near the end of the film, of petite Marie standing on pointe to kiss
her tall boyfriend is particularly wonderful — as well as the melancholy of
Ivan Le Lorraine Albright's 1929 painting "There Were No Flowers Tonight."
When the film shifts to the sunny island
summer long past, scenes are composed with such verve and joy that to return to
the autumnal discontent of the present is wrenching and painful.
This is
as much a testament to Bergman as it is his cinematographer, Gunnar Fischer,
who also shot Monika, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and a number of other Bergman films. His black-and-white photography is exquisite,
accentuating the natural beauty of the islands and archipelago — as well as of
Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson — and deftly playing it off the squalor
of man-made Stockholm and characters' interior emotional prisons. Nilsson and Andersson would be exciting and
devastating in these films without Fischer's camera — Nilsson's capacity to
play both sides of Marie (boundlessly enthusiastic youth, beaten-down repressed
older woman) is stunning, as is Andersson's transformation from wild free
spirit (a kind of proto-hippie) to feral island creature to an hardened urban
sexpot. But Fischer pulls so much from
their faces, eyes, bodies, gestures, and movements that they become iconic.
As are
these films. By now it's passé to say
that Criterion has done a service to film lovers and movie watchers by
releasing this, that, or the other. But
Criterion has given us a real gift in finally making Summer Interlude and Summer
with Monika available in such pristine quality. Not only can the films be seen, where before
you had to hope to catch them in one-off screenings or in a Bergman
retrospective, but the conversation about Bergman as a filmmaker can, finally,
expand. Critics and scholars have long
written about the beauty of his films and how his work goes beyond the pop
culture clichés of The Seventh Seal.
By filling in early-career gap in
Bergman's home video oeuvre represented by Interlude
and Monika, the casual filmgoer can
be a part of that discussion now, too. If,
that is, they can come down from the high of watching these films.
As you
would expect from a Criterion release, both films get a flawless technical
presentation. They look incredible —
better than they ever have on home video. Blacks are deep, grays are crisp, and
whites are clean. The restoration work
put into the films also accentuates the brilliance of Fischer's cinematography
— you can see pores and makeup in close ups, you can discern individual rocks
on the archipelago shores, sun gleams brilliantly off of watery surfaces. Interlude
does have some scratching and soft spots, but this is due to Criterion having
to patch together source materials for the restoration. Still, they're negligible and do nothing to
deter from the film. Monika looks as good as it possibly
could — the nearly 60-year-old film looks like it could have shot made
yesterday while retaining its tactile celluloid qualities. Sound-wise, these are dialogue films so your
home theater system isn't likely to get a workout. But the moments of ambient, natural noise
— an owl hooting, water crashing on a shore, a boat rocking while in dock
— are subtle and clear.
Also par
for the Criterion course, Monika is
an extras-laden disc. It includes a
trailer; a new interview between Bergman expert Peter Cowie and Monika herself,
Harriet Andersson; a 30-minute documentary, Images from the Playground,
of Bergman at work made up of behind-the-scene footage from the making of
Monika; a feature on Kroger Babb and the exploitation of Monika; and a Bergman
introduction to the film recorded in 2003 by SVT Svensk Television. The booklet features an essay by Laura Hubner,
a 1958 review by Godard, and a publicity piece in which Bergman interviews
himself. All are excellent and expand
our understanding of the film and its historical context.
But the Summer Interlude disc is another story. There are no features on it. No trailer, no documentary, no commentary,
nothing. All it boasts is an essay by
Cowie. This is a real disservice to this film. It deserves at the very least some of the
historical grounding Criterion does so well on other releases. Still, it's hard to argue with the restoration
work put into it. Perhaps in that
respect Summer Interlude is its own
special feature.
- Dante A. Ciampaglia
