Bergman: Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika) (1953)

Many of Bergman’s early films revolve around the lost hopes and dreams of youth, and Summer With Monika is no exception – it’s about a young working-class couple, played by Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg, who retreat from Stockholm to the Swedish Archipelago, where they live out a blissful summer before being forced to return to the city and its constraints. What sets the film apart, and turns it into something of a transitional piece, is the lyricism and naturalism of its vision – there are very few films in Bergman’s body of work that present nature as optimistically and romantically as occurs here. Admittedly, that makes the return to the city even more startling – it feels as if Bergman has made his romantic vision purely for the purpose of forsaking it – but the lyricism’s not incongruous with Stockholm either, even at its bleakest. In part, that’s because Bergman makes so much of the connective tissue between the city and the Archipelago - around half the film is shot from the water, surrounding everything with a erotic sheen, while the journeys in and out of Stockholm are particularly spectacular. At the same time, Bergman evokes a slight bleakness around the edges of the Archipelago itself – for all his summery, tranquil montage sequences, there’s a residual starkness that anticipates the arrival of winter, however distantly; an ever so vague presentiment of the allegorical landscapes of The Seventh Seal and the oneiric landscapes of the Silence trilogy. Combined with the neorealist sensitivity to Stockholm evinced in the opening segments, that means that it’s only by returning to the city that the couple manage to feel the full import of the landscape they’ve left behind. And that represents a significant step in Bergman’s chamber dramas – the moment at which his chambers become truly agoraphobic, by managing to distill the outside world to its most elemental, expansive and cinematic. It’s appropriate, then, that it’s also one of the most self-reflexive of Bergman’s films – along with a series of direct stares to camera that well and truly break the fourth wall of his earlier, more theatrical works, the whole return to Stockholm is initially motivated by the couple’s yearning to revisit the American film of their first date. That obviously enhances the bleakness, especially since they’re not actually able to afford to see the film once they do return, but it also subsumes it into a wider New Wave yearning to reimagine Europe in the light of Hollywood cinema, perhaps explaining why Godard championed it as Bergman’s masterpiece.