Un'estate d'amore

I watched this movie and was transported, both in transports of delight, and mentally transported back to Sweden, where I had a brief but intense love-affair.

The scenes with the two young lovers, meeting and playing on the lake, with the little boat, with the dog, "Squabble", picking berries, were so finely drawn on screen, they could have been transcribed from my memories...

Cinema can be magic, and cinema like this can make one's life more wonder-filled.

"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.

On the face of it, "Summer Interlude" is a fairly straightforward narrative; a ballerina (Marie, masterfully played by Maj-Britt Nilsson) in her late 20s (so in the ballet world, nearing the end of her career) seems detached from the world. She lives with a fairly stolid and boring tabloid journalist (David, in a wonderfully understated performance from Alf Kjellin), but doesn't seem terribly invested in their relationship. On the day of the dress rehearsal before opening night, a package arrives containing a journal - she opens the journal, and suddenly she feels emotion again - as if part of an interior wall is starting to crack. She takes a ferry out to an island where she spent her childhood summers, and flashes back to a summer romance that occurred there in her teenage years - and thus a complex, beautiful, and tragic story begins.

This is considered by most - including the Swedish master himself - to be Bergman's first mature film as a director, and with good reason. His previous offerings, while showing glimpses of the promises he would deliver on later in his career, were hampered by his limp, flawed male protagonists. This is the first film in which he explores the female as protagonist, a trope which would continue through most of his career, and it's clear that he has a much better grasp on the female psyche than on the male - with one notable exception ("The Seventh Seal"), his male protagonists often come off as variants of the director himself. Marie is at once strong, uninhibited, and vulnerable as a young woman, and Nilsson plays this role sublimely. As a mature ballerina, she has the appearance of strength that comes from a deadening of the emotions, rather inhibited, and invulnerable - a woman behind a wall she was forced or persuaded to build around herself. Nilsson also takes on this role masterfully, showing the versatility and virtuosity of an actress whose career peaked far too early.

The male lead, and Marie's love interest, is Birger Malmsten as Henrik - also wonderfully played as (by this point "yet another") incarnation of young Bergman himself. But unlike the male leads of previous films, Henrik is played with such an earnest innocence and naiveté that we can't help but buy into this wonderful performance. This isn't the director subtly displaying a sense of self-loathing, but rather, baring his soul through his marvelous script and direction. The ancillary roles are all excellent, as can be expected from actors working under Bergman. Stig Olin is particularly fantastic as the master of the ballet company. Kjellin's "regular guy" is believable in both his distance and his frustration, and lascivious "Uncle" Erland (Georg Funkquist) is delightfully seedy and erudite. Gunnar Olsson - the obligatory Bergman priest - is a very minor character, but fits perfectly into the few scenes he appears in. The rest of the supporting cast is fantastic.

As one would expect from a Bergman film - especially an early collaboration with his first significant cinematographer, Gunnar Fischer, and frequent editor Oscar Rosander - the visuals are stunning. I won't get over-technical here, but a wonderful mix of slow-fades, natural summer lighting, and exceptional composition make this a visual gem. Working on-location - a rarity for Bergman at this point in his career - he masterfully captures the feel of a short (6-8 week) Swedish summer, from the cuckoo that officially announces the start of summer to the owl that signals its approaching end. The lighting is masterfully achieved; contrast the scene when Marie first bumps into Henrik on the island to that where she walks down the hospital corridor. Every scene - including the outdoor ones, which are far more difficult - are perfectly focused and use exactly the right perspective.

Thematically, "Summer Interlude" is almost a crystal ball we can stare into to see the marvelous things the director would do in the future. Love, and its reverse. Life, and its reverse. The questioning of god's existence, relevance, and goodness. This is one of the first Bergman films to significantly use the mirror as a thematic element, in two back-to-back scenes, near the end of the film - this theme would be repeated in many future films, from the shattered mirror in "The Magician" to the dual mirrors in "Cries and Whispers", this would be a leitmotif that Bergman would employ time and time again. There is a chess scene in "Summer Interlude" that would directly evoke that of "The Seventh Seal" had the former not been shot 5 years before the latter. The distance between Marie and David tangibly feels like the silence between the sisters in "The Silence".

The overall TL;DR synopsis: This is a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted portrayal of young love that evokes Bergman's recurring themes of love, loss, the distance that necessarily exists between people, the silence of god, self-reflection, and the existentialist notion that we might as well move forward because otherwise, all we do is wait for Godot. The first masterpiece of a director I consider second only to Tarkovsky, and easily in my top 10 of his films - which is saying a lot. A solid 10/10.

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")

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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