Andres-Camara The actors are great, the majority, but above all the two protagonists. The question is whether this is enough to keep the movie. I think it has several speeds and that is the worst thing I have. Many times in the summer time, it expands on descriptive planes, the exit and entrance, and then the end of the film tells the story of a couple, how he solves his life, how she is fed up and changes her life, And everything at full speed.If that marks very well as was the world at that time, although I have my doubts that the girls were like that, not even in Sweden.But I've put a five because although I do not like the film in the end but I think it's done in earnest and pretends to tell something, but it's boring me a lot.Spoiler: I think the best thing about the film after thinking a lot is the title. I thought because I would be serious and I understand that it is because after all I only spent that time with her.Although the plane when she dresses and is going to go and flirt and have fun is great. The rest of the movie, I do not like almost anything like it's shot. I do not usually like Ingmar Bergman rolling and this was not going to be less. Saving some loose plane I believe it rather because it wants to make general plans that by vision in front of the camera.

Scarecrow-88 I'd like to think everything will turn out alright for Harry (Lars Ekborg) and his little baby girl, because the young man had set up a future for his family by hard work and training in a school to make life better. I don't think, however, the same promise of a bright future exists for Monika (Harriet Andersson) as she is presented as very self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and too immature to accept responsibility for a child born out of a liberated, care-free summer. When they meet for the first time it is in a low-rent café in Stockholme. She chats him up and pretty much initiates their relationship by provoking a date to the theatre to see a romance. They are entrapped in unflattering, low-income, blue-collar jobs (he helps pack and deliver boxes, with the employers/employees haranguing him often about his poor performance and work ethic, while she deals with the male co-workers at a green-grocery always hitting on her), and she urges him to "escape" with her to parts unknown in a boat his father owns (Harry's father has stomach problems (cancer?) and remains very ill) at the end of spring as summer is about to begin. During this summer, the two lovebirds are on their own, with gathered clothes, a small bit of food, a little drink, and enough petrol to travel for a bit. A former lover (it is implied at the start she's a harlot, and as the movie closes, proof emerges this is the case) just causes Harry a lot of grief, attacking him at one point while he's walking home after a date with Monika and later discovering their boat, attempting to burn it along with dumping their items (clothes and such) in the water! When this goon is later found in bed with Monika, Harry's never the same…that Monika would not only do that but imply love, I can't imagine the anguish Harry felt.There are three chapters in Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika: before, during, and after that summer following Harry and Monika. The difference between the teenage lovers is that Harry puts others before himself (Monika and the baby) while Monika only thinks about herself. Rent is due and she chooses a dress instead, the baby is handed off to Harry's aunt because Monika wants nothing to do with her, and once Harry is off working with a crew of engineers she carries on with a number of affairs. At one point, Monika mentions that she wants to have fun while she still has her youth, and there are plenty of moments where she pretties up for guys, with Harry oblivious to her betrayal. Obviously, Bergman's camera has a way of enhancing the idyll of that blissful summer as the kids are off getting lost in a fantasy, but the very beginning also heightens Stockholme due to the stark beauty of the B&W photography. It is when the material emerges out of the idyll that reality is all so assertive. You can only stay away from reality so long: Harry realizes this and moves forward while Monika pursues another path towards fantasy. I asked myself at the end where Monika will be once her nice body and good looks fade, and the alternating door of boys and young men halts. I again picture Harry, with another woman who will see all of his attributes and accept a love and affection he will surely provide, and his baby girl escaping the one-room apartment as his career gets him out of the slums. He is humbled but I think he's a survivor.

Robert J. Maxwell It must be agonizing to be deeply in love with someone who feels only a casual and momentary attraction to you. Better, the object of all that affection should be completely indifferent, and still better if the other person hates your guts. But that, along with a lot of multi-layered symbolism is what the movie is all about.But this is 1953 and it would be a mistake to confuse "Summer With Monica" with Ingmar Bergman's later stuff, like "Scenes From A Marriage," by which time he'd gotten all minimalist and spiritual. In "Scenes From A Marriage," a man and wife talk for two hours in a single room. The Big Reveal leads to one or the other raising his or her eyebrows. I don't remember. I've done my best to forget. My wife dragged me to it and after a few minutes of fierce boredom I began to doze off the way I do at the opera. I haven't looked but I'd be surprised if "Scenes From A Marriage" didn't get a statistically significant better approval rating from women than men.Anyway, compared to that, "Summer With Monica" looks like a John Wayne Western from the 1930s. Lots of action. The two lovers, Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson are having a miserable time in the city. He's nineteen and has no aim in life. She's eighteen and lives in a cramped apartment with her drunken father and a horde of squalling brothers and sisters. They run off and spend the summer together on Lars' small boat, roaming the rustic waterways, swimming naked, getting drunk, eating wild mushrooms, and spending nights devoted to the delicacies of Venus. She gets pregnant. (It was a shocker in its time and shown only in art houses.) As summer draws to a close they return to the city, where Lars finds a satisfying job and Andersson remains the narcissistic, self-indulgent slob she was during the summer. And worse. When he returns early from a job, he finds her in bed with another man. She spitefully tells Lars that she loved the guy she was sleeping with.I don't want to go on about the plot except to emphasize that it moves very quickly. Lars' acting is okay. He's an earnest young man who takes the short Scandinavian summer off when the Minnesingers arrive and the cuckoo sings. He's all right but Andersson's is a compelling character and she is an enthralling actress. If you doubt it, watch the scene in Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly" when her hallucinated vision of God turns into a giant spider.Bergman's direction is stylistically innovative but in a curiously quiet way that doesn't draw much attention to itself. At times, it can only be described as "artistic." I don't just mean the picture postcard compositions of fields of waving reeds, or the liquid reflection of the sun breaking into multiple scintillating globes before coalescing again as the ripples pass, or the black-and-white rainbow.The ugliness is turned into beauty too, like a shot of the stark, black steel girders of a bridge that the lovers camp under. And there is one shot that simply would never have occurred to any American director of the period. Lars leaves on a business trip after handing her some money to pay the month's rent. Instead, Andersson gussies up in front of the mirror and sits in a bar. The camera holds for an outrageously long time on her stunning face, turned halfway towards the lens, assessing the audience out of the sides of her eyes, her sensuous lips ready for business.You know, the summers are brief, like life, Bergman seems to be telling us. Better enjoy them while we can, before we have to buckle down to the business of getting along for eternity.

TheLittleSongbird Summer with Monika is one of Ingmar Bergman's, Sweden's greatest director, best films. It is incredibly well shot tying in wonderfully with the themes of disillusion and desertion, with some of the most memorable images of Bergman's 50s films. The shots of Stockholm and the sunlit scenes of the otherwise islands of great isolation stay in the mind for a very long time. Bergman's direction as always is superb, while the music fits the contrasting moods perfectly and the dialogue is understated and thoughtful. The story is basically a study of young summer love and alienation of city life, and it manages to be the last examples of that and one of the best as well. The joy and innocence of this kind of love is done to both haunting and poignant effect. The two leads exude a great chemistry and both give fine individual performances. Lars Ekborg makes the adoration aspect of his character very believable, but Harriet Anderssen for me gave the more impressive performance. Her performance is sassy with eyes that are very telling of anything but. All in all, Bergman has directed so many wonderful films that show him as a master of cinema, and Summer with Monika is up there with his best. 10/10 Bethany Cox