Bergman 8: Summer with Monika (1953)

A beautifully simple story, tremendous performances, and consistently strong visuals. (I'd never particularly thought of Bergman as an influence on Béla Tarr before but some of the compositions, particularly in the first part of the film in the town, have something "Tarrian" about them.) I wonder if the emblematic images of predatory nature (owl, spider) influenced the rather similar - though more extended - use of such devices in The Night of the Hunter two years later. Certainly the film still seems to be influential - the story of young people who attempt an existence with one another in isolation from wider society and responsibility resonates, as others have noted, all the way up to something like Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. (Or perhaps it's just an "archetypal" narrative.) Bergman's film is of course free of Anderson's cutsieness, but I think the later film conveys a sense of the childlike as something distinct from the childish that is not so clear in the Bergman, which seems to be more of the opinion that to be childlike is, in the final analysis, just a cover for childishness. It's a shame that it demonstrates this by means of what is hard not to see as a misogynistic streak. The collision of fantasy with real life is well handled, and certainly the film tries to show that the same things that made Monia exciting to run away with are the same things that make her hard to live with, but it seems inadequate that Harry is allowed to become older and wiser, while Monika simply slips out of the film when sex won't make things better.