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Summer with Monika
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Ingmar
Bergman’s Summer with Monika has
always inspired intense passion in its devotees. François Truffaut – whose
responses to films he liked tended to veritable erotomania – deemed a saucy publicity photo of Monika (Harriet Andersson)
worthy of theft by the hand of his alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), in The 400 Blows (1959). Jean-Luc Godard wrote several wildly
adulatory pieces about it near the end of the 1950s. More recently, scholars
including Alain Bergala and Antoine de Baecque have acclaimed it, retrospectively, as a key work
in the development of modern cinema.
Bergman
himself recalled it with great fondness all his life, as a 2003 intro for
Swedish TV screening, included on the superb Criterion Blu-Ray edition, shows.
He had a personal investment: in his mid 30s when he embarked on the project, he
promptly fell in love with its barely 20 year old star, and ended up leaving
his wife and children for her (background imparted with admirable honesty by Andersson in Peter Cowie’s 2012
video interview on the Blu-ray). If ever a film burned with amour fou both
in front of and behind the camera, it’s Summer
with Monika.
In
the fascinating 30-minute Images from the
Playground (2009, also on the Blu-ray), directed by Stig Björkman and co-produced by the Ingmar Bergman
Foundation and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, we see this loving
gaze upon Andersson prolonged even between official
takes, whenever Bergman turned his trusty 9.5mm Bell and Howell camera in her
direction.
Summer with Monika remains a film of
remarkable freshness and vitality – crossed with a melancholic, even bitter
vision. We see better today this consistently split-level construction: how the
dream of youthful passion lived out by Monika and Harry (Lars Ekborg), in their brief rejection of a drab Swedish
society, is counterpointed at every turn by the practical realities of money,
ageing, inevitable disappointment and everyday mundanity.
One
enduring appeal of the film is perfectly clear in the 21st century:
it is a model teen movie, in not only its
plot and characters, but also its entire style and mood. Its centrepiece is a lengthy island idyll, in which the social
world is still never entirely absent – but where, nonetheless, the young lovers
manage to escape far and deep enough into nature to live out, for a precious
while, their shared dream.
This
is what Godard responded to in 1958 (a piece helpfully reprinted in the
Criterion booklet), when he suggested that Bergman’s camera “seeks only one
thing: to seize the present moment at its most fugitive and delve deep into it to give it the quality of eternity”.
Once
Monika falls pregnant, of course, the reality-principle comes knocking:
marriage, work and the event of childbirth – something that Bergman presents
almost in horror movie terms, as the moment of separation that will forever
fatally divert a woman’s love from her man. (Such jealousy directed at his own
children is a bad vibe to which Bergman candidly admitted.) In the fatalistic,
indeed brutal suggestion that love will always pass, and that betrayal by the
woman is inevitably on the cards – a male castration nightmare that infuses
Bergman’s cinema – we might see the deepest link between the Swedish master and
his comedic, self-styled protégé in the USA, Woody Allen. The latter’s recent
films, such as Whatever Works (2009)
and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), pivot on the moment when the earthy, non-intellectual woman spontaneously
decides, as Monika does, to opt for a sexier, less emotionally demanding,
immediately available guy.
For
commentators past and present, Andersson as Monika
has heralded the New Woman in European cinema of the 1950s and early ‘60s
alongside Monica Vitti, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne
Moreau and Emmanuelle Riva; some feminist critics, including Geneviève Sellier, have queried the woolly existentialism – and ultimate
male-centredness – of this formulation. Be that as it
may, there is more at stake in Summer with
Monika than a specific, amorous tête-à-tête between actor and director blown up to indelible screen art.
For
those who worship it, Summer with Monika seems to hold some keys to that great question whispered among cinephiles: what is cinema? Almost any film, with a little
forcing, can be presented as a significant “transitional point” between what
precedes and what follows it in cinema history; Bergman’s film, however, is an
especially rich meeting-place for significant currents that have shaped the medium.
Laura Hubner’s perceptive essay in the Criterion booklet
makes the link between the Italian neo-realism that the film recalls (in its
often squalid, quotidian detail) and the French Nouvelle Vague that, in so many
ways, it anticipated – most famously, in the withering look into camera that
Monika/Andersson performs, recreated by both Doinel/Léaud in the final shot of The 400 Blues and Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle (in the latter case, also routed via Seberg’s turn
the previous year in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour, Tristesse).
But Monika’s reach is wider still. Seen
today, there is a striking continuity between the French poetic realism of,
say, Jacques Becker, and Bergman’s sympathetic view of the drudgery of daily, working
life.
When
Godard eulogised the film, he made a further set of
connections: Bergman retained, rather anachronistically, “devices dear to
avant-gardists of the 1930s” (such as Louis Delluc, Dimitri Kirsanoff and Jean
Epstein), ranging from double exposures and reflections in water, to backlighting,
and montages devoted to the surrounding environment (city or island). And it is
in these depopulated montages that Summer
with Monika stakes its claim to a legacy far more recent than the Nouvelle
Vague: here is the seed of today’s contemplative cinema, whether von Trier’s
landscape inserts in Breaking the Waves (1996), or the moodier, more psychologically-inflected vistas of Carlos Reygadas.
It
is a pity that Criterion did not call upon the expertise of the French critic
Alain Bergala, author of the beautiful little book Monika (Editions Yellow Now, 2005), in
the production of their Blu-Ray. He proposes the following genealogy. With Jean
Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1936) and Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1949) on one side, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965)
on the other, Summer with Monika compels us to identify a privileged site of modernist innovation: islands,
insular spaces which almost magically liberate filmmakers to explore space,
improvise with actors, and experiment with the camera.
Bergala uncovers the rigorous and heartbreaking
formal logic underlying Bergman’s film: city life is marked by claustrophobic,
cramped frames and menacing, off-screen presences; while island life is
open-ended, a childlike paradise, a place where the forward march of dull,
linear time stops and another sort of time reigns – that eternal present
praised by Godard. Taking the film as a whole, we can see today what a master
of mise en scène Bergman truly was: working
with all four sides of the screen, he consistently found expressive ways to dynamise space, place, and the objects of the physical
world.
In
another book, Bergala (a true Monika obsessive!) has explored the specific traces that Bergman’s
film left in the cinema of Godard – an intertextuality that has little to do with conscious quotation, depending more on unconscious
absorption or transmission (as Bergala likes to call it).
In
fact, one recent movie gives us a vivid illustration of this process, as it
passes silently from one filmmaker to another. Remember Monika and Harry, in
their natural idyll, dancing to a humble-looking, portable record player? That
player, hit by a pesky beach wave, reappears in Pierrot le fou. From there, it becomes the radio
blaring “Love is Strange” to the jiving teenage lovers-on-the-run in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). And then it’s back to being a record player in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), where the pop
music of Françoise Hardy accompanies another immature boy-girl pair in their
flight from a restrictive, soulless, adult world.
Does
Anderson realise he’s the latest stopover in a line
that leads straight back to Bergman? It doesn’t matter, really, what he thinks,
or knows. As Jean Rouch once proclaimed, films beget films, in a mysterious,
subterranean circuit – and that is among the secrets of cinema which Summer with Monika so richly
illuminates.
I
have only one small complaint to make about Criterion’s otherwise flawless
presentation of Summer with Monika on
Blu-ray. In all the versions I have seen, whether on VHS, DVD or television, it
has been abundantly clear that a key moment is missing around the 56 minute
mark – the culmination of the most intense, erotic scene between Monika and
Harry, marked by a fast fade-to-black, as the lovers hit the ground together,
and Monika bares her chest. The moment is there, fleetingly, in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma,
as a screenshot in Bergala’s book, and even (with
censorious reframing!) in the snippet of Kroger Babb’s infamous exploitation
recut for the USA market in the 50s (Monika,
Story of a Bad Girl!) included on the Blu-Ray. But the film itself is still
lacking this crucial footage.
In
a way, the oversight is fitting: Summer
with Monika can now remain a mysterious, ever-elusive fetish-object for cinephiles of all ages.
MORE Bergman: The Seventh Seal, The Touch © Adrian Martin July 2012 |
