Summer's lease hath all too short a date

Ingmar Bergman – Summer With Monika

When I’m watching Ingmar Bergman I feel I should be watching how he’s filming his movie as much, if not more, than what is actually in the film. So, with his reputation preceding him what did I see in this film?

Sex. Well, not really, or, rather, not yet:

There are two young lovers in this movie who are, at first, full of life and naiveté. The girl, in particular, is a  force of nature, a force of adolescent nature. Even in Sweden adolescence had not been invented in the 1950s. So, without that space, indeed, without freely available contraception,  her youth  is curtailed by her sexuality; she gets pregnant and that defines the rest of her life in the film.

Bergman is playing around with the audience, though. What happens in the courtship that leads to the pregnancy is  nothing less than titillation. She is dangled in front of the audience as a sex symbol. This seduction of the audience implicates them in giving her this status.

It starts subtly:

A shot of a window and some potted plants fading out followed by a shot of the needle on a 78 getting to the end – finally the female lead, smoking and looking relaxed has tried on the tights given to her by her boyfriend. So, Bergman is showing the audience that they’ve made love; fine.

Even if Swedish audiences would have thought nothing of her promiscuity at the time, Monika’s character is, from now on, just sexual.

In one scene soon after, she is sexually assaulted in her workplace. Had the preceding scene showing her promiscuity legitimised this episode?

Well, after she gives birth, she rejects the child. The father is left taking care of  the infant while the mother moves on to another lover.

It is very hard to understand the forces that influence women in their roles as mothers. Bergman pre-liberates his heroine in this movie. Yes, she rejects her child but she has been so beautiful, so free, so tempting and tempted that Bergman brings us to see the world from her point of view and who can condemn her?

So, ambiguity? Shift the longitude a few degrees to the west to the Ireland of the 1950s and you would have hell; not ambiguity.  Women were punished horrifically for such transgressions in my country at that time.

We should have imported Bergman’s ideas. Our ideas were misogynistic, priest-ridden, disgusting.