It was Babb\u2019s brainstorm that brought Bergman\u2019s 1953 Summer with Monika<\/em> to these shores two years later as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl!<\/em> Chopped down to 62 minutes and dubbed into English with an added jazz soundtrack, the film played on double bills alongside something called Mixed-Up Women. <\/em>Capitalizing on the scandal surrounding Arne Mattsson\u2019s One Summer of Happiness<\/em>, such presentations cemented for generations a rule of thumb that Swedish films were full of frolicking nude starlets, a misconception I imagine led to some unpleasant awakenings for anyone who wandered into The Virgin Spring<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Babb\u2019s bastardization of Monika<\/em> is long out of circulation \u2013 I wish it had been included as an extra in Criterion\u2019s Bergman box set — but in watching the director\u2019s original 98-minute edit one can see how it might not take much in the way of restructuring for this material to come off as hysterical. Lars Ekborg stars as Harry, a handsome shlub who\u2019s a verbal punching bag for his miserable bosses at a low-wage warehouse job. But everything changes when he meets Monika \u2013 a curvy, luminous wild child played by Bergman muse Harriet Andersson. She basically bulldozes him into taking her on a date to the movies, where Monika gazes wide-eyed at the stars on the silver screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One can see why she longs for such an escape, as Monika\u2019s father is an alcoholic moron who smacks around her and her mother. Harry\u2019s home life is more muted, but no less depressing. His old man is a sickly widower with stomach problems who spends most of his time brooding in silence. Fed up with their crummy jobs \u2013 she gets groped on a regular basis by her co-workers \u2013 the two are revved up with a heady mix of hormones and literature about outlaws when they abruptly quit their gigs and hightail it out of town on Harry\u2019s dad\u2019s old boat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two spend an enchanted summer exploring islands of the Stockholm archipelago, presented as a sun-dappled paradise of peek-a-boo nudity. One presumes this segment was the bulk of the Babb edit, as it\u2019s both beautiful and undeniably erotic. Bergman was madly in love with Andersson at the time, and you can feel it in every frame. It was such a joyous time on the set, nobody particularly minded that the entire sequence had been rendered unusable by a scratched camera negative, and they happily went back and shot it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the thing about paradises is that they\u2019re inevitably lost. She soon figures out that she\u2019s pregnant and a return to the real world beckons. Suddenly we\u2019re back to the drudgery of day jobs and night school, living cheaply in cramped quarters with a crying baby, so broke that Monika can\u2019t even afford to go to the movies. She was never cut out for this kind of life.It’s easy to imagine how Babb\u2019s salacious edit painted this \u201cbad girl\u201d who runs off and leaves her hard-working husband holding the baby. What\u2019s unexpected is how much Bergman seems to empathize with a character most other movies would treat with scorn. (You get the sense the filmmaker doesn\u2019t care for Harry very much. He\u2019s kind of a drip.) In the film\u2019s most famous moment, Bergman holds the camera close on Andersson\u2019s face after she lights a cigarette. She turns and gazes directly into the lens as the background behind her is plunged into darkness. A young movie critic named Jean-Luc Godard rhapsodized<\/a> about how the actress \u201cstares fixedly into the camera, her laughing eyes clouded with confusion and calls on us to witness her disgust at involuntarily choosing hell instead of heaven. It is the saddest shot in the history of cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Except Bergman doesn\u2019t seem to see the domesticity she\u2019s ditching as any sort of heaven, no matter what Godard said. A scene of Harry being kept up all night by the crying baby could be something out of Eraserhead<\/em>. There\u2019s not much solace in the straight world, and the film leaves Harry wandering in the ruins of the old warehouse where he worked when he met Monika, haunted by flashback memories of a summer that, like all summers, can only last for so long.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Summer with Monika” is streaming on Kanopy<\/a> and the Criterion Channel<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/summer-still-1024x636.jpg\")
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