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Several rough impressions on toxic relationships and postwar Europe, opening on a whirlpool and closing on an Arethusa coin. The early passages in the Basel hotel certainly go into Le Mépris, with the camera trying to keep up with the zigzag pacing and snipping of a young wife (Eva Henning) bored and clammy while hubby (Birger Malmsten) hides under a pillow. Remembrances can't alleviate the stifling air (a sun-dappled vista is promptly revealed to be crawling with serpents), an affair with a married lieutenant (Bengt Eklund) led to a botched abortion and the heroine perpetually feeling "all muddy inside." From one box to another, the train ride to Stockholm through Germany's refugees and ruins, elsewhere midsummer is celebrated via parallel miseries. "What use is a heart to a dancer who cannot use her legs?" A dead-end about dead-ends and yet Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika flow directly from it, Ingmar Bergman has the empathetic and probing technique for these characters' braided fates. (The screen is at one point a blank slab to accommodate two faces in close-up profile, at another it is a detailed high-angle of a morning wharf in which rippling water states an off-screen suicide.) "A sea of tears and misunderstandings separates the sexes," so it goes with the widow (Birgit Tengroth) who ditches the goatish doctor (Hasse Ekman) only to be hit on by the lesbian ballerina (Mimi Nelson). Loneliness and sterility and the lecturer's dream of murder, for good measure a pitch of Strindberg (Trefaldighetsnatten). "The breakdown is imminent." Tormented togetherness is ultimately preferable to the void of solitude, and there's the same punchline two and a half decades later in Scenes from a Marriage. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |