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Sommaren med Monika (1952)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

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From Time Out Film Guide

A tender yet unsentimental account of a love affair that turns sour. Harriet Andersson gives a precociously assured performance as a wild, feckless girl from Stockholm's poorer quarter who falls in love with a 19-year-old youth. During an idyllic motor-boat holiday among the islands of the Stockholm archipelago, the girl becomes pregnant and the couple, forced to marry, set up home in a tiny, cramped flat. Very soon, love gives way to distrust and hostility, and they agree to part. Bergman's sympathetic eye and Gunnar Fischer's atmospheric photography invest the locations with a poetic significance, the light and open spaces of the holiday islands contrasted tellingly with the dark claustrophobia of the city, where the flame of the couple's love is slowly extinguished by the lack of air.

Author: NF

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

Technoguy said...

Posted on Aug 01 2008 13:21 A love affair as poignant as the fleeting summer.The 50s feel of in-laws and cramped spaces.The great sense
of the escape from work and slavery,the glinting summer sun reflected in the water,the sporting young lovers without a care in the world.Then with offspring the need to earn more money with the re-emmersion back into reality and wage slavery with no escape.Bergman showcases the remarkable Harriet
Anderson,who went on to make more films with him.She had none of the introspective,nervous intensity of his later heroines,but an sense of instinct and wild abandon.The story is simple and well told.

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