Il pleut sur notre amour

When Maggi (Barbro Kollberg) misses her train, she meets David (Birger Malmsten) that invites her to go to a Salvation Army hotel to share a room with him. They have one night stand and on the next morning, David tells her that she had spent one year in prison. They decide to wander together and during the rainy night, Maggi twists her ankle and David breaks in a cottage to protect her from the rain and cold. Out of the blue, the owner Per Håkansson (Ludde Gentzel) appears in the cabin and offers to rent it to the couple. David finds a job with the local gardener Andersson (Douglas Håge) despite the opposition of his despicable wife and befriends two peddlers and a neighbor. When Håkansson offers to sell the cottage to David, Maggi discloses that she is pregnant of a stranger she had met a couple of months before she knew David. But sooner the naive couple leans the bureaucracy of his country and the selfish human nature of his neighbors.

The romance "Det regnar på vår kärlek" is the second film of Ingmar Bergman about a young couple with a questionable past that decides to move together to build a new life and finds how the selfish human nature of their fellowships and the behavior of the authorities of their country. The story recalled me Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" of the same year, with the defense attorney acting like an angel in the lives of Maggi and David when there was no more hope to the couple. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Chove Sobre Nosso Amor" ("It Rains over Our Love")

This early Ingmar Bergman film already bears the marks of a great director with a striking sense of images - the cinematography is already here remarkable, at times touching on expressionism. It is a well written idyllic story of a young couple in trouble, he being just released from prison after a year for theft, and she being pregnant by an unknown man. They break into a small empty summer house, in which the owner of it takes them red-handed - and decides to rent it to them, so they start a life there under difficult and very basic circumstances. That's the set-up of the play, which turns in various different directions as the young couple struggle on in a cold October weather with lots of raining, and they have to endure some harassment from authorities, one of them being a very self-complacent and sanctimonious priest - a typical Bergman character, who always loved hanging out priests of double standards. It's an enjoyable film with a very appropriate score by Erland von Koch, combining dark comedy with social criticism in a perfect frame of idyllic environment - an ideal film of coziness.

I love and admire Ingmar Bergman as well as a vast majority of his films. It Rains on our Love is not one of his very best, it starts off a little formulaic and slow and while there are some very interesting and well-explored themes they were even more fully explored later on. It Rains on our Love is beautifully shot and striking to look at, and Bergman's direction is adept and disciplined as usual. The dialogue provokes thought and the story is moving and compelling. I admired that It Rains on our Love didn't resort too much to melodrama and none of it felt cheap and overly-sentimental. The ending even has some optimism that doesn't feel forced in any way. And then there is the cast who are exemplary. Birger Malmstem and Barbro Kollberg are strong in the lead roles, but the wry performances from Bergman regulars Erland Josephson and Gunnar Bjornstrand were even better.

Overall, while not one of Bergman's very best, it is very good and well done and one of his better early films easily. 8/10 Bethany Cox

The title sounds like another of Bergman's early dockland melodramas, but this - his second film - is more good-natured whimsy in an attractively photographed rural setting.

Some of the scenes and compositions feel like flash-forwards to Bergman's fifties work; two that specifically anticipate 'Wild Strawberries' are the courtroom setting it concludes with and the fairy godfather played by veteran actor Gösta Cederlund (billed as the "Man with Umbrella") who gatecrashes it to serve as the young lovers' defence counsel. Having emerged in the opening shot from behind an umbrella like the stranger in the dream sequence at the start of 'Wild Strawberries', Cederlund thereafter saunters in and out of the action - sometimes in a haze of cigar smoke like Leon Ames as Mr.Candle in 'Yolanda and the Thief' - occasionally breeching the fourth wall to comment urbanely on the action.

This feature, like Bergman's first' is a relatively simple melodrama. Both follow rather simple narratives about characters going through simple struggles. And yet, where his first one left me unmoved, this second film is at the very least Charming with also thought provoking commentary on Swedish society at best.

Like Birger Malmsten's character David says in the first minutes of the film, "Damn Society", or something along those lines at least. Time and time again our two lovers are confronted with unfortune from society and everytime they pull through and come out stronger, ending in a finally in court that felt satisfying to say the least.

While nothing too special in terms of Cinematography or anything like that I think this is a more than fine film and a good start for Bergman. It's funny to see these light hearted early films of him that feel almost out of place when compared to his dramatic works we now know would later follow. I guess the Swedish audiences at that time were more interested in light hearted films about love than deep ones about human nature and death and such.

3/5 Stars.