Summer with Monika

Shooting came to an end on 6 October 1952. Tage Holmberg and Gösta Lewin (both of whom had edited and directed a number of popular films) got the job of editing the film. A third editor was Statens Biografbyrå, the Swedish board of film censors, which cut ten metres (22 seconds) of 'brutal kicks to Harry on the ground'; and 'breast fondling after the heavy drinking scene'.

The film had its premiere on 9 February 1953 at the Spegel Cinema in Stockholm. Although the film did subsequently become a box office success, initial responses were rather lukewarm. Dagens Nyheter held the view that it was 'full of clichés: Swedish film clichés in general and Ingmar Bergman's private clichés in particular'. Robin Hood, writing in i Stockholms-Tidningen, found it hard to identify with Monika's changed mental state when the couple return from their idyll in the archipelago to the grim reality of Stockholm:

On their return to city nothing goes according to their wishes. It may well be that the conclusion rings true in a realistic sense. But it fails to do so artistically. Director Ingmar Bergman has built up something that is unfulfilled.

Fogelström's script is perhaps more consistent. The director has focused on certain personality aspects in the beginning, which has the effect of pushing others aside. At the end, Harriet Andersson displays character traits which are positively disagreeable. This is unsatisfying.

Many years on, the conclusion of Summer with Monika has divided its feminist interpreters into two camps: those who applaud the revolt of this wife and mother of a young child against a repressive system, and those who feel that Bergman forces the viewer to condemn her. The fact, as Robin Hood observes, that Monika is unpleasant is probably a key factor in the differing opinions surrounding the film, but the device was undoubtedly a significant artistic achievement for the time.

Svenska Dagbladet disapproved of the film version's shift of focus from Harry to Monika (even though its reviewer, in common with all others, heaped glowing praise on Harriet Andersson): 'Well, for a start he has stripped that little trollop Monika of all the good nature and purity of soul which, in the book at least, go some way towards counteracting her listless indolence, her irresponsibility and generally bitchy frame of mind. He has made her a bad-tempered vixen, unkempt, unwashed, uncombed and aggressive.' Given that Summer with Monika is often held out as one of its director's 'most spirited' films (it was classified, incomprehensibly enough, as a comedy by Stockholmstidningen!), it is interesting that 'Lill', writing in Dagens Nyheter, should be of the view that:

All tenderness, freshness, compassion and humour seems to have been drained from Ingmar Bergman. Gunnar Fischer's captivatingly rhapsodic images of Stockholm's spring mists and the glittering island paradise of summer stand alone in a special way, without any counterpart in the story as such. And the little sympathy that the director has left for the youngster is nothing like the sympathy he usually feels for his young women. Does Ingmar Bergman like girls so much that he is unable to portray some disagreeable traits without overdoing it?

A number of people got up and walked out during the premiere screening at Spegeln. Perhaps, quite simply, they were bored. Because, incredible as it may sound, Ingmar Bergman has made a boring film this time, sometimes faltering, for the most part sluggish, badly edited.

As mentioned above, the film went on to become a success despite the criticism. Perhaps the nudity that got past the censors had its part to play. In SF's programme for the film, Bergman himself had anticipated the debate about sin that the film sparked off. 

If Summer with Monika suffered from censorship in its native Sweden, almost the opposite was true when the film launched in America. The US distributor had not only opted to translate the title to the more suggestive: 'Monica: The Story of a Bad Girl', but also –as if in an unwitting gesture towards the Swedish censor – 'spiced up' the film with his own footage of nudist bathing on Long Island (the same fate had previously befallen Summer Interlude, or 'Illicit Interlude' as it was first known in the US).

The manager of the Orpheum cinema in Los Angeles, where the film was premiered, was arrested while the film was being screened, and the vice squad of the Los Angeles police confiscated the film copy on suspicion of pornography. The distributor Jack Thomas was also given a fine of 750$ and sentenced to ninety days in prison. Not everything can be blamed on his creative additions: Bergman's original in itself was clearly too much for the American market. Reporting on the case against the distributor, the Los Angeles Examiner quoted Judge Byron J. Walter: 'Monica appeals to potential sex murderers [...…] Crime is on the increase and people wonder why. This is one of the reasons.'

Even after the film had been relieved of the distributor's additions, criticism in America was still fierce, with everyone pointing out the film's moral shortcomings. Films in Review, for example, called it 'a clumsily, carelessly directed sexploiter about a stupid teenager.'

Despite the phenomenon of initial contempt turning to universal praise (so typical in the case of Bergman), the re-evaluation of Summer with Monika came with remarkable speed. Following the huge success of Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, many of Bergman's earlier films got caught up in the flow. Jean-Luc Godard extolled the film more than anybody else. Commenting on the Bergman retrospective in Paris in 1958, he wrote that it:

[...] is the most original film of the most original of directors. Summer With Monika is to the cinema today what Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) is to the classical cinema. Just as Griffith influenced Eisenstein, Gance and Lang, so Summer With Monika, five years before its time, brought to a peak that renaissance in modern cinema whose high priests were Fellini in Italy, Aldrich in Hollywood, and (so we believed, wrongly perhaps) Vadim in France.

The next year, Godard's colleague François Truffaut paid a small yet well-known tribute to Summer with Monika in his own feature debut The 400 Blows, when the principal character Antoine and his friend René steal an iconic still from the film from a notice board.

In conclusion, Summer with Monika has gone down in history in Sweden as a film dear to the nations' heart, and internationally as an important part of the wave of Swedish cinematic liberation which began with Arne Mattsson's One Summer of Happiness, culminating in Vilgot Sjöman's I am Curious - Yellow. Woody Allen sums it all up rather neatly:

Less than enobling was the motive for seeing my first Ingmar Bergman movie. The facts were these: I was a teenager living in Brooklyn, and word had got around that there was a Swedish film coming to our local foreign film house in which a young woman swam completely naked. Rarely have I slept overnight on the curb to be the first on line for a movie, but when Summer with Monika opened at the Jewel in Flatbush, a young boy with red hair and black-rimmed glasses could be seen clubbing senior citizens to the floor in order to insure the choiciest, unobstructed seat.

I never knew who directed the film nor did I care, nor was I sensitive at that age to the power of the work itself – the irony, the tensions, the German Expressionist style with its poetic black-and-white photography and its erotic sado-masochistic undertones. I came away reliving only the moment Harriet Andersson disrobed, and although it was my first exposure to the director who I would come to believe was pound for pound the best of all filmmakers, I did not know it then.