Two more Ingmar Bergman movies, both of them framed around a glorious summer of love that leads to regret.

The first is Summer Interlude. Here, we start with an elderly ballerina who is commiserating with a coworker/friend about how old they are (she’s 28). She gets a mysterious package, which leads her to take a ferry off to an island, where seeing a small cabin draws her into memory.

And her memory is one of being a teenaged girl who meets a boy and has an intense summer love affair on this island, swimming and wandering around and making love in this cabin.

What feels kind of inverted about this memory is that she’s a manic pixie dream girl back then, and normally you’d expect this to be a memory from the perspective of the boy, grown up and longing for this free-spirited summer. But instead it’s this more serious and mature woman who’s longing for her own youth.

And of course, the fact that she is this mature elderly woman in a desolate winter landscape — along with the title of the movie — tells you that her “summer interlude” did not lead to a lasting relationship, which means that we’re waiting to find out how it ends. And this turned out to be very satisfying to me.

Spoilers

So early on in the summer, they’re going swimming, and the guy dives off into the sea from a rock. (Sweden seems not to have sandy beaches, only rocky ones.) And I — as a hyper-cautious old person who would never engage in manic pixie antics — am freaked out by this, and wondering how they even filmed that, because you could hurt yourself doing that, surely they couldn’t just have an actor diving off of rocks in a movie, they could kill themselves. But I tell myself that maybe I’m being silly, it’s not as dangerous as all that.

And then later in the movie, that boy dives off a rock… into too-shallow water, and dies, and I’m like OKAY SEE I KNEW IT. Never dive off of rocks! (Which also reassures me that they did do prepwork to check if it was safe when he initially jumped, because they were 100% thinking about this danger. BUT STILL WHAT IF HE SLIPPED OR SOMETHING, IT’S NEVER SAFE.)

There’s more to the movie than just this core summer fling, particularly in the interaction of the present day and the past, echoes of memory and all that; but really, the core of it is that youthful summer, a kind of wistful memory seen through the eyes of the future looking backward.

Summer with Monika is also about a summer of young love; but this time it’s not through the distancing eyes of age. Our protagonist is a young man, and he’s skiving off work for coffee when he meets a young woman (they’re both like 18 or something, older than the literal kids of the previous movie, but… still basically kids). She’s all griping about how much it sucks to work and they should both just quit and run off together.

He doesn’t take this as a serious offer, but he does set up a date with her, and we see the young lovers meet up for a number of dates; they both still live with their parents, so their makeout sessions keep getting frustrated before they get too far. They are in some ways a bad influence on each other, as they keep inciting each other to skip work or not do the kind of adult-responsibility things they ought to do.

Eventually, she has a day bad enough — she’s repeatedly groped and assaulted at her job, and then her dad beats her, so pretty genuinely bad — that she runs off to the guy and is all like, hey, remember when I said we should fuck all this and run away? Let’s do that. And… he does. He quits his job (he hates his “mean” boss, who is tbf kind of a dick; but also, the young man is legitimately a very bad and irresponsible worker), and they take off on his dad’s boat with zero plan.

What happens here is sort of reminiscent of Vagabond in its trajectory. They take the boat off to islands, and kind of exist in this unsustainable, irresponsible, but romantic(?) summer. They swim, they picnic, they make love; and at first, it seems kind of charming and idyllic (if you are not the kind of hyper-responsible old person I am). But then… less so. They get in a fight with a vagrant. Their clothes get more bedraggled. They steal food, get caught, and she has to run off and hide in a marsh before they can get away again.

But most of all: She gets pregnant. And pretty clearly, you’re not going to be able to have a friggin’ baby on a boat with no food but what you can steal. He wants to head back, but she persuades him to at least wait until the end of summer, which they do.

As they come back to town, they are grim and the music is grim, and the weather is grim, and it’s clear that their idylls are ended. They get a shotgun wedding, he finds a job, and they get an apartment. They’re poor, especially with a baby, but he starts going to night school so he can get a better job in the future.

(An interesting thing here is how responsible adults collude to make sure that they get set up for a reasonably successful family life. Like, today you could never have some parental figures talk to employers and be like “look, he’s going to have a baby, he needs to support his family, give him a job” and have that work, but back then, I guess the community was small enough that it’d make sense.)

There is a world in which they segue into being happy and responsible parents and their irresponsible summer is just a meet-cute. But that’s not this story. Because in this story, Monika chafes at this life. She hates being responsible for a baby, she hates having to keep house, she hates living a domestic life in any way. And so while he’s off at night school, she foists the baby onto his aunt, spends their money on fancy dresses rather than paying the rent, and goes out dancing and carousing and having sex with other guys.

And yadda yadda, they have lots of fights, eventually she taunts him with her infidelity, he hits her (it’s not even a proper fight in the mid-twencen if it doesn’t involve some domestic violence), and she leaves, abandoning him and the baby both.

And so as the movie ends, he’s now a single father with a baby, and you might think that the message is a moralistic one about how he shouldn’t have had that irresponsible summer, but one of the last scenes is him reminiscing happily about that time, and it’s actually maybe possible that the real takeaway is that he’s glad he did have that little interlude before settling down into the responsibilities of adult life, even if it left him with a baby to take care of by himself. (TBF, it’s not really by himself; his aunt is still doing a lot of the housework and childcare.)

What’s interesting about this movie is that I had it in my head that it was scandalous and racy, but… it really isn’t. There’s like one nude scene, and I guess maybe she’s lightly dressed through much of their time in the wild, but it’s not especially horny by the standards of arthouse films.

But turns out, when this movie first came to the US, it was sold to a distributor of exploitation films, run by a guy with the amazing name of Kroger Babb. And he cut the movie down to 62 minutes to focus on the most salacious parts and retitled it Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl with promo materials that promised exotic and sinful Swedish sexual delights.

And to quote Wikipedia: “The exploitation version of Bergman’s film successfully played rural drive-in theatres for years, unaffected by the fact that a year later it was re-contracted, this time with Janus Films, to let the uncut, subtitled version play at art-theaters as well. The film was thus available to two different types of American audiences simultaneously.” Which is kind of amazing. Imagine living in an era where a cut-down Bergman film is the closest you can get to porn.

Anyway, we’re now clearly into an era when Bergman is making Bergman films in this box set. Neither of these is at the level of his best works, but you can definitely see him doing his thing.