The recent DVD release by Criterion of Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 drama “Summer with Monika” finally makes available to American audiences one of Bergman’s very best films and perhaps his most influential—for European filmmakers, if not American ones. The movie’s frank eroticism resulted in its release here, in the mid-fifties, in mutilated form as an exploitation film. In France, however, it provided the (young male) film critics who would become the directors of the French New Wave with an inspiring model of intimate realism—an uninhibited, seemingly first-person account of a young man’s erotic awakening through the forthright passion of a young woman whose hunger for romance and for experience surpassed his practical abilities as well as his moral imagination.
“Summer with Monika” is one of a trio of films released around that time—along with Roberto Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy” and Roger Vadim’s “And God Created Woman” (the revelation of Brigitte Bardot)—all constructed along the schema of a warm-blooded woman who has too much life and sexual energy for her stick-in-the-mud man. In the United States, Bergman came to the fore as a brooding artist of religious morbidity and flaying anguish; for the young French, he was, first of all, an older brother in love and loss.And the hyperinflected modernism of Bergman’s films of the sixties reflects, in turn, the influence of their early films on him.
