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Adolescence into adulthood, a tricky pirouette. Diary in the mail and delays at rehearsal, a free afternoon for the ballerina (Maj-Britt Nilsson) to ruminate. In the abandoned cabin it all comes back to her, a summer ménage with a timid student (Birger Malmsten) thirteen years earlier, "we were alive in those days." In this particularly intensive sonnet on first love, Ingmar Bergman is alive to its glories as well as its omens: The afterglow of lovemaking and the chill of a black-shrouded wanderer, fireworks at a lakeside dance and the owl's cry that suddenly triggers the heroine's awareness of mortality. Carefree flirtations with the lecherous uncle (George Funkquist) and with Nature itself, rocky shores are consumed by sunlight one moment and smeared with blood the next. "A strange mood, almost like a melody" or perhaps a mysterious scent, easily it dissipates into bare trees and overcast skies. Past and present, faces open and jaded, the abundance of wilderness and the austerity of the stage. (Swan Lake is the twirl of choice, Petrushka is next on the theater marquee.) Spring cleaning is the theme, early traces of persistent images—wild strawberries for a cherished memory, a reverend playing chess with a cancerous yet sardonically defiant crone, "a feeling of sitting next to Death." Tragedy erects a wall around her ("I wasn't just protected, but locked inside"), cracks materialize over the course of the remembrance. Hawks' Twentieth Century after hours in the dressing room, quite the assessment from the dance instructor (Stig Olin) in Coppélia's top hat and putty beak. "You don't dare take your makeup off, and you don't dare put it on." The joyous deliverance is being able to stick out your tongue at your reflection in the mirror. (If this is Wordsworth's "Ode," then Summer with Monika is Browning's "Cristina".) With Alf Kjellin, Annalisa Ericson, Gunnar Olsson, Douglas Hage, and Mimi Pollak. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |