Days Like Pearls: Summer Through the Eyes of Ingmar Bergman
Image courtesy of IMDb
By Trevor Ruth
For director Ingmar Bergman, the summer season is a time of year that rests in a perpetual state of nostalgia and contemplation, a time where the magic of youth and reminiscence are as overbearing as the changing weather. Perhaps there is something that draws Bergman to this particular season more than any other, given that he tends to return to summer more than any other time of the year despite the thematic similarities that his “summer” films seem to share. Summer Interlude (1951) and Smiles of a Summer’s Night (1955) view the futility of maturity as it pertains to our sense of self-assurance (making them a bit more mainstream by Bergman’s standards), while Summer with Monika (1953), focuses on the complete opposite, as the two main characters rush into adulthood, though without considering the repercussions that come as a result of one’s blossoming maturity. Age certainly plays a major theme in each film; more specifically, the regression from adulthood to youth and the romance that the season affords. It’s for this reason that I admire Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika for their respective views on summer as an ethereal time where one’s freedom results in the loss of childlike wonder, but the memory of which provides a sense of sentimentality.
In Summer Interlude, we follow a ballet dancer named Marie, who recalls her past love with a boy named Henrik, who dies tragically during the summer from a diving accident. Summer with Monika sees another couple, Monika and Harry, who decide to run away from their lives in the city by borrowing Henrik’s father’s boat and spending the entire summer as island-hopping hermits. Since both films feature couples in solitude, they appear as companion pieces to one another because they both approach similar concepts but from different directions. They both begin in grey, industrial city landscapes and slowly transition towards bright, white beaches that recall the lazy, natural evocation of summer. For both couples, the romance of the season pervades through their spirits almost immediately. Henrik and Monika want to be hopeless romantics, though seemingly as a result of their coinciding family distresses. Henrik tells Marie about how his parents are divorced and how his father pays him to stay away from the home. “No one cares about me except [my dog].” Because of this, Henrik feels his connection to Marie on a much more personal level, whereas Marie has a much more adolescent outlook on their relationship, being a ballet dancer: “I think it’s in my skin. The way you touch me and stroke my skin with your hands.” Like a spell cast by a faerie, the season draws on Henrik’s emotions and invites a more intimate approach that Marie cannot contend with, but she can at least appreciate.
Image courtesy of IMDb
What draws Marie and Henrik together, subconsciously, are their views on the summer season as a time of liberation, a time to separate themselves from the world beyond the island. Henrik doesn’t love living with his dad because of his elderly girlfriend. With this in mind, it’s no doubt that Henrik is possibly dealing with a lot of emotional turmoil himself, enough to express a great deal of insecurity when it comes to Marie’s relationships with other men, her uncle in particular (this is not the only instance of incest in a Bergman film), who shows a keen, albeit still unsettling, physical attraction to Marie throughout the film. Due to this, Henrik lacks a great deal of confidence in himself, “you must think I’m stupid.” Similar to their views on the summer season, it’s obvious that Marie doesn’t particularly take kindly to her uncle, either; even if she decides to pursue that relationship in the wake of Henrik’s death.
Summer Interlude further treats summer as a time of reflection; where our past experiences give way to rose-colored recollection. Marie’s memories of her summer spent with Henrik are blossoming idiosyncrasies; they begin when Marie obtains Henrik’s notebook and soon, we are transported into her past life. The superimposed image of Birger Malmsten’s face on the notebook brings an unsettling transference into a world where everything appears unfamiliar and impressed. Again, this makes Summer Interlude appear almost as if we are reliving a fantasy, featuring our two leads. Henrik himself even acknowledges at one point: “Perhaps we’ve landed on another planet.” As if by some form of magic, the ballet’s rehearsal is suddenly cancelled, allowing her the freedom to revisit her memories on the island. Marie returns to the island of her first love and it is here where her memory carries her back to the waters that have drawn her, originally, towards the magic of summer evenings: the water unperturbed and bright in the hot sun. It is on this island that she and Henrik fall in love and their respective pasts are played out before us in youthful abundance. Perhaps it is for this reason that Bergman chose to use an orchestral score for the film whereas a majority of his filmography uses music sparingly, in lieu of forced emotion. Not to mention, the uncanny use of animation in Summer Interlude heightens the surreal, dreamlike quality of the season, along with melodramatic moments like when Marie reacts unfavorably to the call of an eagle owl (this could be seen as foreshadowing, too).
On an almost completely equal level, Summer with Monika treats the approaching summer season with a similar kind of magic, even down to the male lead verbally acknowledging the sense of unreality that has come as a result of their freedom:
Monika: We haven’t been to the movies since Dream Girl.
Harry: No, we’ve been living our own dream.
Freedom for Monika and Harry, however, comes with a certain kind of indulgence that plays to the immaturity of their youth. In some way, Summer with Monika is a coming-of-age story, albeit a tragic one, that comes as a result of the characters’ inexperience. Their freedom is one of mere escapism, they see a chance to leave the world that treats them with insubordination and they take it. As island-hoppers in their boat, they are free to make up their own rules, to embrace life as it is presented to them in the natural world: quickly edited portions of film showcase the environment that they have chosen to call their home—seagulls, sand through water, lightning passing by a dark cloud, rain on the surf, the sun and finally a rainbow—are rapturous in their expression in not only the passage of time, but also the present fragility of their situation. For them, it is certifiably a dream to indulge in the summer season, however the dream eventually ends once reality begins to make its grand approach, once more.
Image courtesy of IMDb
The reality that Harry and Monika try to escape from comes a bit more slowly than it does with Henrik and Marie. In Summer with Monika, the youthful exuberance of summer dies, gradually, when Henry and Monika’s vacation is consistently interrupted by outside sources. A random arsonist attempts to burn their boat and their belongings one day, resulting in Monika losing her clothes, while her pregnancy forces the two of them to search for more ideal ways of obtaining food, outside of cooking mushrooms all day. Desperate to support themselves, we finally see the two conflicting with one another in their difference of opinion. Harry tells Monika that they need to go back home so that they can support their child, but Monika continually refuses to leave her dream to return to the world that treats her with such scorn: “I’m not going back. I want summer to go on just like this.” Even in the beginning, after Monika and Harry return from the movies, Monika attempts to reenact a scene from the film, infatuated with the love of another. We learn early on that Monika is more interested in the romance of life, while Harry looks at the world more realistically and attempts to support his wife and child by taking classes and finding work as an engineer. Meanwhile, Monika feels neglected at home. She has no clothes and she is bored all the time. “I want to have fun while I’m still young,” she laments, and while we might see the insecurity of this complaint, we can also see an adolescence within her as well. Despite their desire to be more independent from the society that raised them, Monika does not really have the tenacity to become an adult and, despite Harry’s best attempts to keep their marriage sacred, Monika sleeps with another man. Harry hits her out of a broken anger and Monika cries about how everything has gone wrong. Monika lacks the understanding that summer is temporary and, due to this, she leaves Harry to take care of the baby and potentially goes off to indulge in the youth that she was seemingly forced to abandon.
For Marie and Henrik, the end of summer comes with a bleak and rather sudden shock back to reality. After an accident involving Henrik jumping from some rocks into the water, Henrik suffers from some horrible injuries and dies. The sequence of shots that portray his death are intrinsically poetic, as we watch Henrik’s body wash up on a shore before the camera pans upward, towards a dark cloud covering the sun. The promises the two kept for one another and the love that they shared comes to a complete halt, and when Marie leaves Henrik’s body in the hospital, the scene cuts directly to the dance studio where her uncle picks her up in a torrential downpour. Summer has ended and the sun has now transpired into heavy rainfall. Eventually, Marie moves on, leaves her uncle’s predatory care and finds a new love in a journalist named David, who has to be patient with her because of her emotional reliving of the summer she spent with Henrik. As she remembers her lost love, Marie seems to also lose faith in the hope and joy that she once had: “Let me mourn my youth in peace.” But just as her nostalgia takes ahold, something happens. She makes a face to herself in the mirror; she acknowledges that despite everything, she is happy. With this simple action, she regains some of her youthfulness back and in doing so, is able to feel the optimism and the magic of the summer season, despite the prevailing winter season that has arrested her heart.
If there is anything to truly take away from Bergman’s films, it is that summer, while enchanted, only exists for a limited duration of time. Because of this, there hardly seems enough time to enjoy one’s self, but this also means that whatever memories come as a result of the season resonate deeper within all of us. Summer with Monika reminds us to take in the experience and not headlong into adulthood, but, rather, to look at our summers with a more meditative mindset. While Summer Interlude teaches us that our memories of summer keep us moving optimistically forward, to a greater experience just waiting beyond the horizon. Both of them speak volumes to the human condition; how we perceive our pasts and futures and how the way we react, now, certifiably affects both. As we enter summer now, we alone must choose how to respond to the feelings that the season brings us, and however we respond impacts whatever new memories that we create.
Trevor Ruth is a writer from Livermore, California, whose work has previously appeared in Occam’s Razor, The Southampton Review, and other literary journals. He writes fiction and poetry that utilizes slipstream to subvert genre ideals, as well as critical essays on film and art.