Jeux d'été

This Ingmar Bergman's earlier essay is a dedicative recount of a young ballerina's summer holiday puppy romance with a timid college student which culminated in a tragic accident and the narrative leaps between the reminiscent past and the present (13 years later, when she is preparing her SWAN LAKE premier).

The film is slightly differentiated from Bergman's usual philosophy-heavy, mentally- straining members of his reservoir, a summer vacation in a Scandinavian island, with youth in bathing suits, is a curio to find out. But the die-hard Bergman fans will as always revel in the solemn nuances and formidable expressions from Maj-Britt Nilsson's heroine, whose god-spitting manifesto "I'll hate him till the day I die!"defies any compromise and detour, which could also be Bergman's mouthpiece speaking.

There are many aesthetically haunting shots with utterly perfect structural deployment (which cannot be a surprise since this is the sixth Bergman's film I have watched so far), a witchcraft of radiating the characters' frank and inherent emotion and sixth senses through Black & White lens, the portrait close-ups, the little cartoon on the letter, even the ballet tableaux, all sparkle with resilience of a human soul's elusive fickleness. The wild strawberry, chess playing with the clergyman and the hag with mustache, there are many anecdotes here just for perusing.

Ms. Nilsson captures all the spotlight in the film, although she and Birger Malmsten are quite awkward in pulling off mid-or-late teens in love since wrinkles and creases cannot lie, but it is almost a mission-impossible for any actress since spanning 13 years especially from teenage to adulthood is a great challenge, nevertheless, this blemish can not overthrow the film's majestic study on a psychological case of a lost love soul's selective protection and rejuvenation, although may not be Bergman's best, still a recommendable film from the maestro and furthermore attests his consistency in filmic supremacy.

While waiting for the night rehearsal of the ballet Swan Lake, the lonely twenty-eight year-old ballerina Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) receives a diary through the mail. She travels by ferry to an island nearby Stockholm, where she recalls her first love Henrik (Birger Malmsten). Thirteen years ago, while traveling to spend her summer vacation with her aunt Elisabeth (Renée Björling) and her uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist), Marie meets Henrik in the ferry and sooner they fall in love for each other. They spend summer vacation together when a tragedy separates them and Marie builds a wall affecting her sentimental life.

"Sommarlek" is a simple little film of the great director Ingmar Bergman in the beginning of his successful career. The plot discloses through flashbacks a tragic and timeless love story affecting the life of the lead character that builds a wall to protect her sentiments and loses her innocence with her corrupt uncle. The cinematography, landscapes, sceneries and camera work are awesome, using magnificent locations and unusual angles to shot the movie. Maj-Britt Nilsson and Birger Malmsten have great performances in this beautiful and melancholic film. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Juventude" ("Youth")

Much of this early Ingmar Bergman film is an elaborate flashback of the event indicated in the title. An accomplished ballerina reflects on a love affair of her youth. They meet and soon are lovers (they both admit that up to this point they have never kissed another before but it doesn't take long before they're rolling in the hay) and we get nearly overkill sequences of hackneyed depictions of exhilarating young love : running on the beach, jumping into each other's arms, copious gropings, falling over each other with utter joy, endless kissing and hugging, excited expressions of mutual endearment ; it becomes withering after a while. Despite some light foreshadowing of something else to come, I began to see the movie as an apprentice effort by this great master as he improvises an innocuous love affair as a sheer movie making exercise.

The recollection is cut short by tragedy and the story returns to the present. Everything changes and bleakness replaces happiness. Dark personal imprisonment replaces innocence and freedom. The story moves to conclusion with some interesting new characters and some trenchant dialogue. I'm no expert on Bergman but intuitively I wouldn't be surprised if the second half of this early movie might just be some of his best stuff. This is almost two movies in one. The ending might surprise.

Notes: 1) In the flashback, she has an uncle who fits, categorically, the definition of slime in the sense of preying on young girls. He wants to be her "protector." A conversation seems to indicate that something sordid has passed between them. "I shouldn't have let you touch me," she says. Is this literal or figurative? The relationship between them is not developed. The decadence of the remark is jarring. 2) In a somewhat humorous vein, the young lover says to her, "I love you so much I want to eat you up." She says, "Where would you start?" "I would start with your brains and work down to between your thighs. I have a cannibal friend who told me about this." Yike!

And thirdly, there are some lovely ballet sequences that are beautifully weaved into the narrative, including an instance near the finale which is quite telling (and moving). There is a wonderful scene when he barges in on her as she practices. The camera is stationed on the floor showing close ups from her knees to the floor as she fires away with some elaborate pyrotechnics of exquisite lower limb maneuvers of the art. Through this marvelous camera setting, he is visible across the room sitting in the background reproaching her for thinking more of her career than about him. The camera work there is inspired. This movie should be included in any discussion about ballet in cinema.

Certainly recommended and with an added caveat ; don't give up too early; do but hang awhile, it's worth it.

Love story perfectly told. Life story perfectly told.

First of all I was angry watching the to lovers being enormously happy. It was so unreal and idealistic that I said to myself - you can see this only in movies. The two lovers were talking the strange language of love that makes them fool around and boost. That makes them feel the need to show off and to be something more. That naive language of their naive youth.

Suddenly this romantic cloud was blown away and this movie become more realistic, lifely realistic. Yeah, it was trivial but told in Bergman's way it was also very beautiful and true. It showed the change that we all live trough the language that is familiar but we do not speak any more, the things in life and the life caught in the walls of self preservation, senselessness and absurd where the only one escape is the ultimate love - the only reality.

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"Sommarlek" (literal translation: "summer play" or "summer frolic") is seen by many as the true beginning of director Ingmar Bergman's career. Abandoning his traditional, often unlikeable, male protagonists of his earlier efforts, in this film he casts a female lead to act out a story from his own youth. It was a brilliant maneuver that proved to be a huge, career-defining success as Bergman was now able to explore more sensitivity and sentimentality, not to mention aesthetic beauty, through the female viewpoint. And the actress herself, Maj-Britt Nilsson, does an amazing job of covering the entire spectrum of joy and despair.

The story begins on the stage of a ballet rehearsal, the night before the big show of Swan Lake. Our heroine "Marie" (Maj-Britt Nilsson) is 38 years old which in ballet terms is practically in the grave. Certainly in terms of emotion she is presented as almost a preserved corpse, beautiful but utterly drained of life. An accident shuts down rehearsal and she leaves to go home but takes an unexpected detour on a boat which takes her to an idyllic little island where she spent a summer of her youth 13 years prior.

This is where the magic of Maj-Britt Nilsson's acting shows itself. The youthful "Marie" is so thoroughly playful, happy and childish that I literally had to pause the film to check if it was really the same actress. It is. And immediately the suspense is set: how does such a happy-go-lucky young girl turn out to be the jaded painted relic we saw on the ballet stage?

What follows is a love story that's almost ridiculous in its perfection, but that's the point. As Marie says, it feels like being inside a soap bubble. Bergman and his filming crew made excellent use of the sights of summer (even though the typical Swedish summer is barely 2-3 weeks long) to convey a fantasy in the natural world.

Ultimately the audience knows it must somehow return to the dark stage of the present, and so psychologically this cute love story has the air of a mystery all the way through. This is my favorite part of the film, the way it's implied that the love story will end, and thus there's no need for contrived conflicts and cartoonish peril. Yes, there are shadows of malice but these shadows are subtle. The screech of an owl (announcing the impending end of summer) accompanied by Marie's sudden inexplicable terror, and a shift in cinematography to a darker, more sinister look-this is the kind of subtle, artistic foreshadowing I'm talking about.

In the last part of the movie there are some excellent monologues, all done in the quiet darkness of Marie's dressing room. Certain lines are so poetic you'll want to memorize them, such as "It's like being a painted doll on strings. If you cry, the paint runs..." And to me that's where the film, and Maj-Britt Nilsson, really deliver. The last line (which I won't ruin!) ends on a cryptic note which makes you want to watch the whole film again.

"Sommarlek" is a great film, not just as a historical marker for Bergman's career but as a standalone work of cinema. I would compare it to the Max Ophuls masterpiece which would come 4 years later, "Lola Montès" (1955). Both films give us a lavish epic focusing on a caged woman facing the memory her wild & free past, but in this case the "lavish epic" is wonderfully contained on a tiny island over a few fleeting weeks of summer.