Sommarlek

Plot synopsis:
Marie (Nilsson) is a successful but emotionally distant prima ballerina in her late twenties. During a problem-filled dress rehearsal day for a production of the ballet Swan Lake she is unexpectedly sent the diary of her first love; a college boy called Henrik (Malmsten) whom she met and fell in love with while visiting her Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Erland's house on a summer vacation thirteen years before. With the cancellation of the dress rehearsal until the evening Marie takes a boat across to the island where she conducted her relationship with Henrik and remembers their playful and carefree relationship.
Three days before the end of the summer when Henrik is to return to college and Marie to the theatre, Henrik falls and suffers injuries that result in his death after diving from a cliff face. Her Uncle Erland, not actually her relation but a friend and admirer of Marie's mother and now similarly smitten with Marie, takes her away for the winter and helps her to "put up a wall" to lessen the pain of losing her lover and effectively close her off emotionally. While visiting Erland's house she discovers that it was he who sent the diary to her at the theatre; he has had it ever since the day at the hospital when Henrik died from his injuries. She expresses regret and disgust that she ever allowed Erland to touch her, suggesting that he took advantage of her grief and they had an affair following Henrik's death.
Following the evening dress rehearsal, Marie talks with the ballet master, who recognises her single minded devotion to her dancing and understands her problems, and then to her current lover, a journalist called David, with whom she appears to be in the process of breaking up. Marie decides to let David read Henrik's diary and then open up to him about her past experiences in order to explain her conflicted feelings and emotional coldness. After he has left, she removes her make up and as she does so regains some of her lost youth and innocence, smiling again and pulling faces in the mirror. The film concludes during the successful first performance where we see Marie meeting David, now more understanding of Marie's past, in the wings. She happily kisses him and returns to the stage to finish the ballet.

Tags: flashback

Review:
While waiting for the night rehearsal of the ballet Swan Lake, the lonely twenty-eight year-old ballerina Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) receives a diary through the mail.
Thirteen years ago, while traveling to spend her summer vacation with her aunt Elisabeth (Renée Björling) and her uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist), Marie meets Henrik in the ferry and sooner they fall in love for each other.
They spend summer vacation together when a tragedy separates them and Marie builds a wall affecting her sentimental life."Sommarlek" is a simple little film of the great director Ingmar Bergman in the beginning of his successful career.
The plot discloses through flashbacks a tragic and timeless love story affecting the life of the lead character that builds a wall to protect her sentiments and loses her innocence with her corrupt uncle.
I watched this movie and was transported, both in transports of delight, and mentally transported back to Sweden, where I had a brief but intense love-affair.The scenes with the two young lovers, meeting and playing on the lake, with the little boat, with the dog, "Squabble", picking berries, were so finely drawn on screen, they could have been transcribed from my memories...Cinema can be magic, and cinema like this can make one's life more wonder-filled..
On the face of it, "Summer Interlude" is a fairly straightforward narrative; a ballerina (Marie, masterfully played by Maj-Britt Nilsson) in her late 20s (so in the ballet world, nearing the end of her career) seems detached from the world.
She takes a ferry out to an island where she spent her childhood summers, and flashes back to a summer romance that occurred there in her teenage years - and thus a complex, beautiful, and tragic story begins.This is considered by most - including the Swedish master himself - to be Bergman's first mature film as a director, and with good reason.
Nilsson also takes on this role masterfully, showing the versatility and virtuosity of an actress whose career peaked far too early.The male lead, and Marie's love interest, is Birger Malmsten as Henrik - also wonderfully played as (by this point "yet another") incarnation of young Bergman himself.
Working on-location - a rarity for Bergman at this point in his career - he masterfully captures the feel of a short (6-8 week) Swedish summer, from the cuckoo that officially announces the start of summer to the owl that signals its approaching end.
Every scene - including the outdoor ones, which are far more difficult - are perfectly focused and use exactly the right perspective.Thematically, "Summer Interlude" is almost a crystal ball we can stare into to see the marvelous things the director would do in the future.
The distance between Marie and David tangibly feels like the silence between the sisters in "The Silence".The overall TL;DR synopsis: This is a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted portrayal of young love that evokes Bergman's recurring themes of love, loss, the distance that necessarily exists between people, the silence of god, self-reflection, and the existentialist notion that we might as well move forward because otherwise, all we do is wait for Godot.
This Ingmar Bergman's earlier essay is a dedicative recount of a young ballerina's summer holiday puppy romance with a timid college student which culminated in a tragic accident and the narrative leaps between the reminiscent past and the present (13 years later, when she is preparing her SWAN LAKE premier).
The film is slightly differentiated from Bergman's usual philosophy-heavy, mentally- straining members of his reservoir, a summer vacation in a Scandinavian island, with youth in bathing suits, is a curio to find out.
There are many aesthetically haunting shots with utterly perfect structural deployment (which cannot be a surprise since this is the sixth Bergman's film I have watched so far), a witchcraft of radiating the characters' frank and inherent emotion and sixth senses through Black & White lens, the portrait close-ups, the little cartoon on the letter, even the ballet tableaux, all sparkle with resilience of a human soul's elusive fickleness.
Ms. Nilsson captures all the spotlight in the film, although she and Birger Malmsten are quite awkward in pulling off mid-or-late teens in love since wrinkles and creases cannot lie, but it is almost a mission-impossible for any actress since spanning 13 years especially from teenage to adulthood is a great challenge, nevertheless, this blemish can not overthrow the film's majestic study on a psychological case of a lost love soul's selective protection and rejuvenation, although may not be Bergman's best, still a recommendable film from the maestro and furthermore attests his consistency in filmic supremacy..
The film recaptures youth's giddy, carefree, brief love affairs ...and its comeuppance, its consequences in future life.
What can I say : lovely, and not least for the Swedish language !PS-Recently, in a program on the history of exploitation (i.e. naughty films) and censorship in the US, it was revealed that quite a few scenes, showing the heroine skinny-dipping in the lake with not much on, were routinely added to this movie !!.
Silence, such as at the doctor's office, is also distributed well throughout.The directing work in this early Bergman film is on par with some of his best direction.
It is one of his least challenging scripts - a simple tale of love between two young persons with none of the philosophy or analysis about how human beings function that make most of his films so interesting.
It is not one of Bergman's best films by far, but still a good sign of things to come from him, and fairly pleasant viewing.
Illicit Interlude (1951) ** (out of 4) Ingmar Bergman film about a woman (Maj-Britt Nilsson) who looks back at her first love, which took place during the summer and its tragedy that stuck with her throughout life.
It is a lovely and sweet story which tells a beautiful ballerina mourning her lover's death at her youthful age.
Ingmar Bergman truly did a great movie at the beginning in 1950s, preceding the following masterpieces in the film history..
A bit too little story (maybe that happens when you try to write about something that you experienced firsthand yourself as a 16 year old nerd boy)  Best thing about this film is Annalisa Ericsson as a bad ballerina and the dirty rich old man portraid by Georg Funkquist.
Much of this early Ingmar Bergman film is an elaborate flashback of the event indicated in the title.
Despite some light foreshadowing of something else to come, I began to see the movie as an apprentice effort by this great master as he improvises an innocuous love affair as a sheer movie making exercise.The recollection is cut short by tragedy and the story returns to the present.
Bergman Comes of Age. While waiting for the night rehearsal of the ballet Swan Lake, the lonely twenty-eight year-old ballerina Marie receives a diary through the mail.
She travels by ferry to an island nearby Stockholm, where she recalls her first love Henrik.Bergman later reflected, "For me Summer Interlude is one of my most important films.
Actually there is nothing wrong with Summer Interlude as such, it's just that I don't think it is quite on the same level as Ingmar Bergman's very best.
The story still has the dramatic intensity and structural complexity that helps to form the best of Bergman's films.
All in all, a lovely film if not quite among Bergman's very best movies.
Ingmar Bergman unfolds his 1951 drama, Summer Interlude, under a bleak canopy of the downhearted and disenchanted, an umbrella of gathering doom and gloom as both the summer skies and its respective weather gently gives way to the harsher and colder characteristics of autumn; as the rural locale in which the film is predominantly set becomes barer, less lush and more frightening as things gradually wind down for a longer, greyer haul.
From its frank opening act culminating in a woman deciding to journey out so as to confront both fears and the pain because of something which still resonates, to its closing of the lead peeling certain things away from her as she additionally quite literally reflects into a mirror following a somewhat successful journey, it is a devilishly involving romantic-drama which works brilliantly.The film covers young Marie (Nilsson), a Swedish ballerina whose mind and whose memories make up the bulk of the film's runtime as she ventures out to a more rural part of her country, but only when the hard graft of bringing to life an incarnation of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake is temporarily halted.
Once back on the floor following the role-call bell and practising again, the film presents us with what appears to be two or three different soundtracks of internal and external music playing over the images, as these rather dramatic dance procedures are presented to us in a relatively close up format whilst the impact of what was read or discovered barely a scene ago resonates.
Once there, at this somewhat desolate; cold; murky and rather frightening place, the film will cover events from thirteen years ago when she was barely out of her teenaged years and a love affair-come-friendship with young boy Henrik (Malmsten) doubling up as her first love.
The harking back begins with the travelling by boat, each item acting as its own landmark upon which Marie's memory acts on particular cues, and Henrik's admitting to feeling for her through performance or third party spectatorship; specifically, that he has watched her perform many times as a ballerina and has felt how he does through these observations before having even met her.Once at the island during her flashback, the warm weather and summer surroundings make for perfect conditions as she visits an aunt and uncle that live there; the occupying of a small beach house all by herself and prospect of lake swimming and time off greatly alluring.
The main actress, Maj-Britt Nilsson gives a great performance as an adolescent girl in the flashbacks and as a grown woman facing the end of youth in the narrative present.
She is such a charismatic character, full of the drive that makes her the master of her craft, and yet fragile as she develops a relationship with a star struck young man who just pops into her life.
One is the flashback romance of the Summer Interlude and true love.
The other is that she must come to grips in some way with the fact that like a mayfly, a ballerina has a short life.
We think of Bergman as frightened and cynical at times, presenting life as a chore with little reward.
While shot in 1950, it fully anticipates Bergman's mature career.As the film opens we are introduced to Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), a successful ballerina in Stockholm who is however visibly unsatisfied and emotionally distant from those around her.
This was a romantic -- and very nearly sexual -- awakening for them both, and Bergman depicts it with all the wistfulness of an adult looking back on the heady days of youth, just like the film's protagonist.
The ending, after we return to the present day from the flashback, feels wrong somehow, the rhythm suddenly jarring and Bergman's point inchoate.Yet overall this is a satisfying picture to sit through, and there are many details to appreciate.
Opening with a church bell, Ingmar Bergman proves his preoccupation with religion as he explores Maria's plight with a summer love as she works on rehearsals for the ballet Swan Lake.
A traumatic event causes Maria to reconsider her life at the end of her career and reconsider her summer spent in love.
Movie is black and white, really slow, about ballerina and I'm allergic to ballet, and on top of it all it's Bergman who is known to be boring.
After rehearsal is delayed for the evening, ballerina goes to stroll around nearby island where she spent summer as young girl and fell in love for the first time.
Marie, the beautiful young ballerina, is near the end of her career.
Marie, the beautiful young ballerina, is near the end of her career.
Among outstanding film directors there are those who crash in with debut features that show something of the full extent of their talent (Satyajit Ray with "Pather Panchali", Neil Jordan with "Angel" and of course Orson Welles with "Citizen Kane") and those like Ingmar Bergman who creep into the scene with films that are little less than mediocre, but who develop slowly, almost unobtrusively, giving only occasional hints of the glories to come.
When the ballerina heroine takes a boat to the archipelago where thirteen years before she met the young man who was to become the love of her life, memory is unleashed and we relive in flashbacks her past happiness.
Although the film is a romantic tragedy it differs from the works of his central period in the way it comes to terms with life's misfortunes.
It is perhaps significant that in "Summer Interlude", where he had not quite sorted out his responses to life or the medium in which he was working, the most powerful scene of all is where the ballerina rails at God's silence after her lover has been taken from her and craves for the opportunity to spit at God should he appear.
It's interesting to note that when scripting this film Bergman would not have been much older than his protagonist: the 28 year old Ballet dancer Marie.
ALIVE is the key word here as Bergman paints for us, in a way that so few other's are able, a vivid picture of the essence of young life and falling in love for the first time, stomach butterflies and all.
However, this IS a Bergman film and, as surely as autumn and winter must follow summer, the light must be balanced by an equal amount of dark.As in Wild Strawberries, the narrative structure unfolds in a series of flashbacks that masterfully deliver vital information in such an order that ensures their emotional impact.
The ballet scenes are of note as they are shot with a beautiful quietude that reflects the understated nature of the whole film.
"Summer Interlude" is an exquisitely filmed movie.
As for the movie itself, it's pretty much what most would expect from an Ingmar Bergman film....something that leaves you depressed and feeling that life has no meaning!!The film begins with Marie a veteran ballerina.
When she receives an old diary, she begins to think back to her youth and her doomed relationship with an ultra-serious young man, Henrik.
By the end, Marie has said that he hates God, that life has no meaning and she's essentially waiting to die...all a bit much for a 28 year-old woman.The overall film is naturally unpleasant.
Worth seeing but not among Bergman's very best--mostly because although the film is shot so wonderfully, it's existential angst is tough to watch AND it made me laugh in the flashback scenes at a nearly 30 year-old actress is playing a girl of only 15!.
Bergman's first "mature" work, indicative of great things to come.
Bergman also was quoted on more than one occasion that this particular film was the first in which his "independent" voice was heard.Like Summer with Monika, which appeared two years later, Summer Interlude focuses on the relationship between a young couple spending their summer in the Stockholm archipelago.
Despite a dark plot twist, Summer Interlude ends up on an optimistic note, in contrast to "Monika," which highlights the pessimism of a relationship gone sour.Bergman's protagonist is Marie (Maj-Britt Nillson), an emotionally cut- off, 28 year old ballet dancer, about to perform in a final dress rehearsal of Swan Lake.
Although it takes a while to get to the "inciting incident" where the story gets going, we're content to observe all the backstage machinations, as Bergman's true-life experience in the theater is proffered in high relief.While the dress rehearsal is delayed due to a technical glitch, Marie receives a package containing the long-lost diary of her college-aged lover, Henrik, whom she had an intense relationship when she was 15 years old; this propels her to take a ferryboat to the archipelago where the two young lovers began an ill-fated relationship marred by a horrible tragedy.We flashback to those halcyon days of youth with Nillson transforming herself into a carefree, fledgling ballet student.
Bergman's portrait of Marie, a mercurial waif of sorts but also completely devoted to her ballet craft, is the best part of the film.
Nonetheless, in the present, Marie now makes it clear that she despises Erland for how he took advantage of her.Summer Interlude ends with an uncharacteristic "happy ending." The woman who cursed God thirteen years earlier and endures the ballet master's cogent analysis of her current situation of emotional paralysis, suddenly does a 180 degree, allows her current boyfriend David to read Henrik's diary and then the next day kisses him, before throwing herself optimistically into to the now live performance of Swan Lake.The abrupt transition between the wounded teenager turned adult and optimistic professional dancer, doesn't quite ring true.
Nonetheless, all the hints of Bergman's masterpieces soon to come, are there in Summer Interlude; especially the masterful cinematography of Gunnar Fischer, one of Bergman's long-time collaborators.
Summer Interlude is worth watching in its own right as there are still many elements indicative of a true master film director at work..
But if this is anything like "Summer with Monika" I'm in for a treat.Ballet and ballerinaing is not a good subject for me.
Bergman was in his prime and tweaking his virtuoso for his next films thenceforward; this is one of his first movies where he co-write the script and where he interlaced the story with a flashback sequence; as a ballet dancer named "Marie" gets ready for her performance in "Swan Lake" she is greeted with an unexpected parcel...
Long before film came on the scene Literature was cutting its teeth on doomed love and throwing up the odd classic along the way.