|
Young romance as a gorgeous season that fades, the Muse as the fickle lass Ingmar Bergman can't stop thinking about. She (Harriet Andersson) is an irrepressible carnal force, suffocated at home and groped at work. A wispy delivery boy (Lars Ekborg) lights her cigarette and soon they're sailing away from the city, ditching "the blessings of civilization" for the rugged Eden of the Stockholm archipelago. A camping trip at first, a picnic, a rejection of middle-class responsibilities played out with childlike jubilation. Nature grows inhospitable as supplies run out and the youngsters are forced to filch food and face the girl's pregnancy, their friskiness gives way to irritation with the end of summer as cityscapes receive them back like so many disapproving grown-ups. "We have been dreaming," the boy has to finally admit. Bergman's spacious extension of Summer Interlude, a sensual elegy along the lines of Ovid's Amores and very much a movie about photographing Harriet Andersson. The actress' half-feral insolence, her physical ampleness, her flitting movements across coastal rocks and her cranky idleness in the struggling couple's apartment are watched with rapt captivation, and yet her Monika is much too volatile to simply settle into an idealized siren. Ditching domesticity for the advances of a local lothario, she slowly turns and locks eyes with the camera in a close-up of Vermeer proportions, daring it (and us) to judge: "The saddest shot in the history of cinema," wrote the callow Godard, who would quote it directly at the end of Breathless and derange the rest in Pierrot le Fou. Ekborg's own close-up is less confrontational and more wistful, a recollection of a vanished idyll and a sigh toward adulthood, "yes, I knew a woman..." Cinematography by Gunnar Fischer. With John Harryson, Georg Skarstedt, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell, and Naemi Briese. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |