Young love ain’t always fun love

IFC brings back a beautiful early Bergman downer

The recently-deceased Swedish director Ingmar Bergman always made women’s films, though not in the sense that The Jane Austen Book Club is a women’s film. Bergman’s movies often focus on a woman plunging deeper into misery as her story progresses, confined as she is by the structures of a relentlessly misogynist society. In this respect Bergman’s Monika, re-released at IFC this week, is undoubtedly a women’s film, but also a youth film. Originally released in 1953, Monika is certainly not a prototypic American Pie-style youth film. However, a softer version of Bergman’s brutal coming-of-age love story can be found in the 1988 Tom Hanks vehicle Big. Both films place a premium on youth, showing in more or less sophisticated ways that passage into adulthood, with its demands and responsibilities, cannot be reversed.

Monika (Harriet Andersson) and Harry (Lars Ekborg), the central couple in this early Bergman gem, learn that the hard way. Kissing on a hilltop above Stockholm’s mid-century skyline, whose only prominent features are church spires and smokestacks, Monika and Harry are very literally seeing their future. For him, a soul-crushing series of labor-intensive factory jobs; for her, a pious domestic isolation, raising children and looking for something better. Inescapable as this outcome is, Bergman makes his protagonists’ transition into adulthood all the more painful by first granting them the ultimate teen fantasy.

Emboldened by their exciting romance, the couple leaves their families and jobs and takes Harry’s father’s boat to the seaside for the summer. A slowly crumbling Edenic fantasy ensues. Initially, Monika and Harry revel in their isolation, with a daily routine of seaside sex, sunbathing and skinny dipping. The couple’s urban anxieties catch up to them quickly though, and their strategies of denial become harder to maintain. They devolve into animalistic scavengers, most clearly in a scene where Monika crawls from a botched food heist on hands and knees with a roast tucked under her arm. As their summer comes to a cold close, sustenance and self-preservation are their only concerns: they have no food, insufficient shelter and Monika is pregnant.

In Monika’s final third, the couple leaves the stark beauty of their seaside escape, returning defeated to a cold and austere Stockholm. Harry takes a job, Monika takes a lover, and the redemption implied by childbirth in many films lasts for about half a scene. The little girl quickly extenuates their misery, fatigue and financial woes, also impeding any intimacy between Harry and Monika. By Monika’s closing scenes, Bergman’s original opposition between the bubbly young couple and the assortment of unhappy adults (bosses, co-workers, neighbors and parents) has collapsed into itself: Monika and Harry, now separated, epitomize the misery they wanted so badly to escape. This relentlessly tragic narrative, longtime Bergman collaborator Gunnar Fischer’s outstanding cinematography and the central pair’s impeccable acting, make Monika a fully-realized Bergman psychodrama, rather than an early model for his later work.

A similar version of this review appears in the November 14 New York Press and can be found here.