Summer with Monika

Being young sucks. You’re at the bottom of the totem pole, you’ve got nothing of your own except dreams, and everything seems to be—or actually is—an obstacle. Then again, you do have something going for you: you’re young, and that’s a far better way to be than any way else. Does the latter fully compensate for the former? That seems to be the question Ingmar Bergman is asking in this meditative and moody movie. The narrative, such as it is, gives the impression that the answer is maybe not—or perhaps maybe yes, but only within limits. So testifies the story as it meanders its way through a naive adventure and ultimately to an inevitable conclusion. In terms of presentation, this film often made me think of those B movies I watched in MST3K episodes, where the riffers would rag on all the sequences that amounted to little more than padding. This movie has many similar stretches that do little to advance a plot but take up screen time with atmosphere and vision—the sort of thing that labels a flick a bad movie when it’s a run of the mill actioner but that is lauded as creative and contemplative in a film as consciously artsy as this one. That’s not to say that Bergman’s shots of Stockholm or the ocean and sky are intolerable, just that they only serve as a calling card of seriousness. So your reaction to this work will depend a lot on your tolerance for that sort of thing. It’s exactly the kind of movie that people envision when they think of a foreign film, and particularly so given its early ‘50s postwar timeframe, the general bleakness of those days (in Europe at least), and the black and white cinematography that conveys a feeling of dull, dull gray and despair. It’s all a rich stew, one that is not particularly to everyone’s taste, but could go down well for those with an adventurous cinematic palate. At the very least, you can watch this movie and remember something of what it was like when you were still young.