Bergman’s Ageless Vixen
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
“I have never made a less complicated film than ‘Monika,'” wrote the film’s director and co-writer, Ingmar Bergman. “We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom.” With its picturesque shadow-dappled views of the Stockholm Archipelago and its bittersweet comparison between the dream and the reality of first love, “Monika” initially appears conceptually lightweight when held up against Bergman’s darker-themed and better-known subsequent work.
But the 1953 film, which opens today for a two-week run at the IFC Center, is blessed with the rare combination of directorial confidence and curiosity evident in the early work of all truly gifted filmmakers. By turns theatrical, realistic, and melodramatic, Bergman’s 12th feature (in seven years) is a cool and peppery shot of cinematic aquavit that assays romance, nature, age, sex, and family, all with the same coolly jaundiced eye.
Proving once again that opposites attract, middle-class 19-year-old Stockolm shipping clerk Harry (Lars Ekborg) is smitten with 17-year-old Monika (Harriet Andersson), the titular tenement girl whose considerable charms have met more than the eye of her other admirers. The love that naïve Harry and unhappy Monika share is too fragile and tender to endure the mocking scrutiny of Monika’s previous beaus and the disapproval of Harry’s invalid widower father and controlling aunt. “Let’s go away and never come back,” Monika tells Harry. His heart a beat behind hers, Harry unties the bowlines of his father’s boat, starts the engine, and together the two lovebirds putter off into destiny. Opening with a series of panoramic shots of the Stockholm waterfront that gently fade into one another, and integrating street scenes with naturally lit and beautifully composed footage documenting Harry and Monika’s clandestine voyage to nowhere, “Monika” is a small-scale visual delight. Clearly as enamored of Ms. Andersson’s physical charisma as almost every male in the film is of Monika’s, Bergman (who became romantically involved with the actress at the time) poses bikini-clad Monika on rocks and astride the bow of the boat heading toward the horizon as if creating a visual ode to both lust and the Swedish landscape.
Bergman’s film, with its fleeting nudity and frank discussion of mild taboo topics that were still a decade or more away from acceptance in mainstream American cinemas, was something of a sensation when it was released here
in 1956. Of course, it had been purchased by the American exploitation distributor Kroger Babb, who cut about one-third of the film, emphasized the skinny-dipping scene, and retitled it “Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl.”
Three decades later, Bergman champion Woody Allen recalled his teenage exposure to the film — courtesy of the long-shuttered Jewel Theatre in Flatbush — as being memorable for “the moment Harriet Andersson disrobed,” rather than for any cinematic awakening caused by the considerable skill Bergman displayed with his actors and camera.
Monika and Harry’s escape from adult responsibility proves temporary. When Monika becomes pregnant, their permanent vacation devolves into a daily search for food, increasingly strained efforts to stay off each other’s nerves, and eventually a landlocked, socially obligated marriage. Family and a career with a marginally brighter future than packing china plates proves to be thehorizonHarrysoughtallalong. But Monika is no more cut out for motherhood and domestic bliss than she was for abstinence.
Like many of the 20th century’s most lionized filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, and Jean Luc Godard, Bergman’s art cradles at its core an anxiety about intimacy and a fleeting trust of male-female relationships. By the time “Monika” concludes, in a series of domestic conflicts as reminiscent of 1940s health-class exposés as they are of “Scenes From a Marriage,” it’s clear that even in this new print of Bergman’s original version, as titles go, “The Story of a Bad Girl” isn’t too far off the mark.
Monika proves to be such a bad girl that in one marvelously provocative moment she brazenly violates the screen’s invisible “fourth wall” separating the viewer from the viewed. Pausing before accepting the embrace of a suitor to gaze coolly into the camera for what seems like an eternity, Monika dares the audience to judge her. If this rebellious, singleminded, and insatiable hussy doesn’t respect the sanctity of film grammar, how can the frail institution of marriage stand a chance?
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