Sommaren med Monika
Ingmar Bergman (1953)
Melvyn Bragg, in his appreciation of The Seventh Seal in the BFI Film Classics series, describes the impact of the first Bergman films that he saw in the late 1950s and highlights one film in particular:
‘Summer with Monika spoke to the condition of many adolescents in the 50s: it could have been my story or that of thousands of others. The nerve of it was that somehow and for the first time, I think, a film tapped itself into the real root of what I knew I had in some measure or would [sic] in some measure or wanted in some measure to experience. The bait was Harriet Andersson.’
The twenty-year-old Andersson plays the film’s title character, a working-class girl in early post-war Stockholm. Monika works in a greengrocer’s shop and loathes it. She meets and starts a relationship with Harry (Lars Ekborg), a young man who is also stagnating in humdrum work in a local glassworks. They quit their jobs and leave the city, in a motor boat owned by Harry’s father, who is currently hospitalised. The couple head for the Stockholm archipelago, where they spend the summer and exult in freedom from drudgery and freedom to have sex. When they return to Stockholm, Monika is pregnant. The couple marry and their baby daughter is born soon afterwards. Harry gets another job and trains to be an engineer. Monika, who, from the day the baby is born, shows next to no maternal instinct, is oppressed by their lack of funds and by a renewed sense of imprisonment. She starts a relationship with another man and walks out on Harry and their child.
In the 1950s, Summer with Monika was controversial for its sexual aspect – in particular, the eroticisation of Harriet Andersson, who is naked in one sequence (reprised, as part of Harry’s memory of their happy time together, near the end of the film). Its cachet as the exemplar of a new freedom in film-making and in the treatment of sexuality on screen tends to obscure the fact that one of Ingmar Bergman’s main themes here is constraint and that his realisation of this theme too is remarkably expressive. The claustrophobia of the various Stockholm interiors is finely conveyed through the cameraman Gunnar Fischer’s spatial compositions and lighting. When Monika undresses, you’re struck by what a cumbersome process is involved in undoing suspenders, removing stockings and taking off a skirt to reveal pants that are by no means briefs. By the time she meets Harry, the heroine has already had relationships with enough men for her to be known in her neighbourhood as ‘mucky Monika’ – and she looks not only slovenly but unwashed. Bergman in this film seems to pay uncharacteristically close attention to the consequences of being hard up – except that the script, which he wrote with Per Anders Fogelström[1], isn’t entirely clear about why Harry, from a comfortably-off middle-class family, appears at the start to be doomed, as much as Monika, to a menial job.
The heart of Summer with Monika is the couple’s time on the boat and the Swedish archipelago. (Bergman and his film crew were based on Ornö, an island in the southern part of the archipelago.) Monika and Harry’s euphoric light-heartedness when they escape there is invigorating for the audience too but Bergman’s use of the landscape and changes in the weather ensures that the lovers’ sense of liberation is never oversimplified. Monika and Harry may, temporarily, be children of nature but it’s a nature whose awesome features underline the fragility of their idyll. Besides, their times of pleasure are interrupted by crises. Fed up with a diet of mushrooms, Monika goes to steal food from the garden of a house on the island on which they’re staying and is apprehended by the bourgeois owners of this holiday home. While her theft from under their noses – and ravenous eating from – a joint of meat is both a dramatic and a comic highlight, an attempt to set fire to the motorboat is shocking in its arrant maliciousness. The arsonist is a youth who is one of the few weaknesses of the film. This is no fault of the actor (John Harryson) but the character, Lelle, is improbably ubiquitous in the story. He becomes a virtually symbolic bad penny – incongruous in a largely naturalistic setting. Lelle is introduced as one of Monika’s previous boyfriends in Stockholm. He then turns up to assault Harry in the yard outside the housing block where Monika’s family lives – and it’s Lelle with whom Monika is unfaithful after the baby has been born. It’s too much that he also happens to be camping on the same part of the archipelago as the lovers.
The boat’s-eye view of its journey under Stockholm bridges and out into more open water is an especially eloquent sequence in Summer with Monika. Bergman inevitably shows the return journey to the city, and the sounds of the city, from the same perspective. Although this back-to-the-real-world sequence has a melancholy pull, the film isn’t fatuously anti-urban. Later, as the newly-married Harry and three senior colleagues return from an out-of-town work assignment, one of the older men looks out of the train window and describes how seeing Stockholm again always raises his spirits. By now, though, Harry’s relationship with Monika is falling apart. Marriage and parenthood, which bring out in him a new sense of responsibility, make her frustrated and resentful. It’s possible to read Monika’s abandonment of husband and baby as censure – by a film-maker from a decidedly middle-class background – of working-class fecklessness but perhaps Bergman recognises too, in dramatising her impatience for material comforts, that Monika has been waiting all her young life for these.
Harriet Andersson creates exceptionally natural shifts between cafard and exuberant freshness. When she’s working in the greengrocer’s, the ‘slut’ Monika has a shopsoiled quality that serves to intensify her excitement and vitality once she and Harry are away on the boat. Lars Ekborg’s Harry, sexually inexperienced compared with Monika, seems much younger than her in the first part of the story. (Ekborg was actually in his mid-twenties, several years older than Harriet Andersson; he was only forty-three when he died.) When the couple return to Stockholm Harry has more noticeably grown up but it’s the achievement of both lead actors, with the help of Bergman and Gunnar Fischer, that their faces age and are rejuvenated according to the mood or meaning of particular points in the story. For example, when Harry first sees his baby daughter in the hospital maternity ward, Bergman keeps the camera on Lars Ekborg’s face. You see in it both a recognition that he has a child to care for and how young a father this is: the effect is very touching. A few screen minutes later, Monika, who’s gone out to enjoy herself, sits in a bar and looks straight into the camera. Bergman holds this close-up for even longer and Harriet Andersson’s confronting, defiantly brazen gaze is extraordinary. She stares the viewer out.
17 February 2015
[1] According to Peter Cowie’s biography of him, Bergman considered Summer with Monika to be ‘in the first instance a film treatment. Per Anders Fogelström and I met on Kungsgatan, and he told me the plot in ten words. And I said, we have to make a picture out of this; and then we started to write the script. And subsequently he wrote the novel’. Cowie notes that the film’s producer, Allan Ekelund, had a different recollection – of forwarding Fogelström‘s novel Summer with Monika to Bergman. The Swedish Wikipedia page on Fogelström suggests that Ekelund may have been right and Bergman wrong: it gives the novel’s publication date as 1951.
