Summer with Monika (1953)

Rated R for nudity, sexuality, teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse, crime, and attempted rape.  Geez, while I absolutely think that this is an R-rated movie, it's weird to think that this movie has all of this stuff in it.  It has the tone of an older film, which makes the questionable content somehow less intense.  But all of those things happen in this film and that definitely is stuff that you'd see in an R-rated movie.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

So...Monika is a lot, right?  

Once I hit the midpoint of the film, that's the only phrase that kept going through my head over-and-over-and-over again.  I have to pivot the way that I'm viewing these movies.  Normally, if I watch special features and supplemental material (which I honestly should do way more often if I had time or patience for it) I tend to do it after I watch the film(s).  I think with how many Bergman movies I'm watching in quick succession, I need to slow down and watch a primer on Bergman because I'm running into the same problem that I have with Woody Allen.

Back in my Thomas Video days, I would regularly do what I'm doing right now.  If I didn't feel educated on a certain director, I would watch all of their movies in a short amount of time.  It was my own way of having retrospectives and it would make me incredibly knowledgeable incredibly quickly.  Some of you out there might consider this to be heresy, burning through a director's complete oeuvre in such a limited time.  Yeah, they blend together.  I understand that. But also, the world is full of great art and I was passionate to absorb as much as I possibly could while on this planet.  I still have that wiring in me, by the way.  But I noticed with some auteurs that not only was there a throughline to their films, but there was almost a sense of repetition.  Now, I love Woody Allen films.  Not all of them and my love for these films have been tempered the more I learn about the dude.  I will say that I generally like Bergman (although my gut is saying, "Not another Bergman" when it's time has come up).  He's got more hits than misses.  But Bergman, at this point, is almost a formula with a lot of his films.

Bergman has heady films and less heady films.  Honestly, I started by liking his less-heady films more.  He kept giving me the right level of melodrama with his earlier films.  They were almost kitchen sink dramas about young love and how it all spirals out of control.  And, besides the fact that it was easier to absorb, they were decent stories.  But now that I've reached Summer with Monika, I'm getting a little tired of the same narrative over and over.  From what I understand, Bergman wasn't probably the healthiest person when it came to relationships.  I'm probably going to be bummed the more research I do into this guy.  From what I understand, he was all about infidelity.  But the thing that is really a red flag is how quickly characters shift from being anti-violence to being domestic abusers.  But the story that Bergman tells often is that men are driven to beat their wives and that it is the wife's fault.

With the case of Summer with Monika, the eponymous character was raised in a home where domestic abuse was commonplace.  It's why she runs away with Harry.  Harry, from a characterization standpoint, is different from the other men in Monika's life.  She has all of these deadbeats around her and they fully embrace the villainous natures that men possess.  There are a handful of scenes where Monika is molested and almost raped, implying that she needs to get away from a world that treats her like a sex object.  When Harry not only treats her with respect, but also comes to her with grievances against society, the two run off, embracing an anti-capitalist lifestyle on a boat.  They pride themselves on having abandoned the expectations of society and there's almost this moment of pure romantic bliss.  But because Bergman seems kind of gross, it isn't Harry who changes; it's Monika.  Harry is the one who is willing to sacrifice for their life of simplicity. 

Once Harry discovers that Monika is pregnant, he's adamant that he needs to provide for Monika and their child.  It's Monika who says that she refuses such notions and the two devolve into thieves.  But while Harry views thievery as part of his appropriately named "Summer with Monika", Monika grows harsh and aggressive, attacking Harry for small mistakes.  She becomes this caustic, toxic personality and then, in the most gross way possible, Monika almost asks to be beaten.  Okay, this is me showing my grossness because she literally says, "Don't hit me.  Whatever you do, don't hit me."  From Bergman's perspective, he is stating the only actual punishment that Monika will listen to.  After all, Monika keeps pushing Harry.  He does that weird thing again, the casual adultery, that we keep seeing in his movies.  These all end up being stories about how easy it is to hurt other people.  With Bergman, it's often the people who cheat who aren't left with the fallout of the relationship.

But the biggest problem that I have with Summer with Monika is the fact that it was so easily turned into an exploitation film in the United States.  Not a long movie by any stretch of the imagination, the U.S. was able to cut Summer with Monika into a 62 minute exploitation film.  The insane thing about that is the fact that I guessed it easily could have been cut into an after-school special about the dangers of loose women fairly easily.  Summer with Monika, despite being incredibly similar to his other films from the era, is Bergman painting with his widest brush yet.  The teen pregnancy angle coupled with the notion that Monika just changes personality on a dime almost screams "morality play" at the audience.  That final shot, of Harry looking at himself and baby Monika (or June?) in the mirror is telegraphing what little subtext there is in the film.  It's just so heavy handed that there's almost nothing to derive from the film.  The title has more depth than the film as a whole.

Also, has Bergman ever raised a child?  There are some fundamental, basic things about rearing a child that this movie does not understand in the least.  That first night sequence, when Harry is the only one to wake up to the screaming baby --which is just a scene to really drive home that Monika is both an unfit mother and an unfit spouse --Harry just covers the baby with blankets.  I wish I could say that it was a commentary on how unprepared these two are to raise children, but the baby does grow quiet after Harry just almost SIDSes the kid.  Also, I know that maybe things are happening behind the scenes with the baby, but that baby needs to be fed.  Maybe it's getting formula, but we get this message that Monika is doing nothing for this child, ultimately leading her to abandon the child once she has been beaten.

Honestly, if I hadn't seen the other movies ahead of this, I would find Summer with Monika quaint.  But given how many of these movies I've seen at this point, this movie almost becomes infuriating.  It almost seems lazy.  The crazy part is that I know that this is part of the cinematic canon.  I think that this might be one of the Criterion films that was released separately from the box before this.  It's one of those kind of "must see Bergmans" and I don't really see what makes it special.  Maybe writing this made me more mad than I was initially, but this was just heavy handed preaching versus nuanced storytelling.